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Clare Arni, Embassy Golf Links Buisness Park, 2007
Alongside the commercial establishments and the public museums and galleries In the past few years the visual arts have opened up to include people from the
are small initiatives such as Colab Art and Architecure and 1 Shanti Road, which worlds of advertising, commercial photography and other media practices. Also
together provide a space for non-mainstream work – places for dialogue and at the Goethe-Institut, Clare Arni, a commercial photographer, recently exhibited
enquiry. 1 Shanti Road is an artist-run initiative that is used both as exhibition and her photographs Earth Bound – Land, Water, People (2006), a visual
studio space by artists from Bangalore, while Colab is a collaborative for art and documentation of the work of German Agro Action (GAA) and its partners in
architecture that was started in 2005 by an architect and curator. It partners with India, which brought into focus the lives of the marginalised in the country. This
a network of artists and institutions from India and abroad to organise exhibitions, year at the Institut, the Bangalore artist Surekha responded to the unnatural
film screenings and talks in different venues around the city. A. Balasubramaniam, deaths of women in the city, whether by self-immolation or drowning, in her
a Bangalore-based artist, participated in Colab’s group show Around Architecture exhibition Communing with Urban Heroines.
(2006). In minimal sculptural works, the artist directs our attention to the world
around us, to things that matter a great deal but which we take for granted. He Surekha’s exhibition organised at the Goethe-Institut; Harsha’s in Bombay by
uses a variety of media, from fibreglass to neon – in 2004, for example, he made Bodhi Art, a large gallery with branches in Mumbai, Delhi, Singapore and the
an impermanent self-portrait out of a slowly evaporating compound. As curator West; and Balasubramaniam’s at the newly opened Talwar Gallery in New Delhi,
Sharmini Pereira writes in the catalogue essay of Balasubramaniam’s show with its main centre in New York: all give an idea of how the artworld in Bangalore
In(visible), which opened at the Talwar Gallery in February this year, ‘In an works. While some artists are connected with certain galleries in the city or
artworld obsessed with the cult of the personality, the idea of a vanishing self- organise their own shows with the help of other institutions, others work with
portrait reveals as much as it conceals’. Delhi- or Mumbai-based gallerists with international connections.
The new Goethe-Institut building in the Indiranagar area is where N.S. Harsha Besides the artists mentioned here, there are many others who live in Bangalore
premiered his recent suite of paintings Charming Nation (2006). Harsha lives and who have different artistic idioms and follow different art practices. Representative
works in Mysore rather than Bangalore, and seeks to evoke the global through of the times, many of them travel, work and show abroad. By the same token,
the local. Primarily a painter, he often works collaboratively, and at the Kala Bangalore has a constant stream of artists and others connected with the arts
Ghoda Festival in Mumbai in February mounted the installation Mirage on a traffic visiting from abroad, sometimes living here for short periods and interacting with
island at the city centre. A life-size sculpture of the Mirage fighter jet, it is a work the local artists and larger public. In a city fuelled by communication industries,
that reflects on the making of contemporary icons and the loss of old ones. The Bangalore is fast becoming one that exemplifies the blurring of the categories
body of the aircraft is covered in khadi, a material that has symbolic associations ‘local’ and ‘international’.
with Mahatma Gandhi and the freedom movement, and the work’s plinth,
covered with cloth, depicts outlines of hundreds of sleeping human figures.
Artreview 164
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