How to use art in your home in ways other than hanging it up on the wall? You could nail it to a bookshelf; spread it over your writing desk; integrate it into the living spaces—including puja rooms, kids' rooms, bathrooms and kitchens—to provide pockets of colour, humour, relief, and other reasons why you like the art pieces and in line with what they're about.
What happens when an outdoor artwork gets rained on? If it's thought through, the work adapts.
What even is contemporary art and what is it made of? The short answer is it could be an aesthetic response to almost any contemporary concern—consumerism, exam pressure, (forced) migration, racism, history, fashion in art, going back to ones roots, politics, social injustices, economic injustices, fun(ny) things, love, sexuality, life, freedom of expression, work, play, climate change, human rights, industry, development, dreams and hopes, you name it. And it could be made with almost anything—fabric and safety pins, soil and brass, painted ceramic, (MDF) wood, embroidery and embroidery stencils (khakha), words and light, paint, ink, canvas, paper and pen, archival inkjet that can last 150 years or more.
These questions—and multiple answers to them—come up across exhibits when you visit the Delhi Contemporary Art Week (DCAW), now in its eighth edition. Here's a deeper breakdown of what you can take away—and see, if you find yourself in that beautiful part of Delhi this week:
What happens when an outdoor artwork gets rained on
Often, nothing needs to be done to outdoor works after a bout of rain. Outdoor works are made to weather the conditions to an extent and for a time. Sometimes, they'll need a good clean-up after a storm but sometimes not even that—think of the street art all around Delhi - Mumbai - Bengaluru, for instance.
At the ongoing Delhi Contemporary Art Week, though, an outdoor installation by Juhikadevi Bhanjdeo responds to the rain. All about the blue flax flowers that are the raw material for linen, it is made with Burgoyne linen fabric and her signature safety-pins. The installation simply looks a darker blue after rain lashes the massive flowers and leaves in the opening outside the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) at Bikaner House.
Bhanjdeo, who trained as a painter at MS University Baroda, says she has been interested in fabric—its foldability and fragility—and safety pins as a way to hold things safely at least since her MFA (master's in fine arts) days. Apart from this self-referential installation, titled Unwoven, Bhanjdeo has two more pieces on show at the DCAW.
How to display art in a way that is contextual
Hanging artworks on the walls of rooms where you entertain guests—drawing rooms, dining rooms, etc.—is the most obvious way to display your art collection. But there are other things you can do with it, too. At DCAW, an entire exhibition space—the Living Traditions Centre or LTC—is dedicated to just this.
Called Taqiya Qalam, the "show"—curated by art consultant Priyanshi S with design curation by Amrita Guha and Joya Nanurdikar is Untitled Designs—is organized like a lived-in space, with halls, living room, study, a cupboard and writing desk and a massive bookshelf. Every space, every surface is a conduit for different kinds of contemporary art.
There are woodcuts by Shantiniketan-trained Chandan Bez Baruah on the walls, Amit Ambalal's monkeys climb up and down a screen divvying up the room, a pair of heels (made with blades, of course) by Bangladeshi artist Tayeba Lipi rests next to a sofa, there's a spiritual corner with room for Chitra Ganesh's goddesses too, a piece in the style of graphic novels finds cadence on a desk, a series of artworks about the intrusion of screens into family time is screwed onto and across multiple book shelves which also make room for sculptural works and a pack of cigarettes, a mantlepiece has an artwork casually resting on it, a 2022 Shailesh BR series about prayer incense is propped on an island and a series of photographs on gay love hangs over a bathtub that's a stand-in for a bathroom ("because I've seen these pictures displayed like this somewhere," explains Priyanshi.)
The key is context. Ways to integrate the artworks in places where they make the most sense, and where possible, in ways that engages with or takes off from their subject, form, history or all of the above.
What is contemporary art (made of)?
The 'Cast in Memory' show at the DCAW is dedicated to sculptural pieces. With participation from artists like GR Iranna, Astha Butail, NS Harsha, K. Laxma Goud, Rameshwar Broota, Ravinder Reddy and Renuka Rajiv, the show has a mix of newer as well more established talent.
In terms the range of materials used to realise the works, there are gold, silver foil, bronze, wood, terracotta, ceramic, paper (cut, folded, glued, treated), fabric, rope, stoneware, stainless steel, birch ply, beads, patina on copper, graphite, ink stains, embroidery... For themes, the works here run the gamut from mythology and selfhood to consumerism and ways of seeing.
Parul Gupta and Madhav Raman's 'Metaprism'—made with laminated glass and glue and plywood—splinters and joins, refracts and reflects depending on where you stand, and it looks a bit like a modern corporate building.
Renuka Rajiv's 'Extreme Perfectionist' in papier mâché unfolds like a graphic novel about "ghosts in the backseat".
A pair of ceramic boxing gloves by Mahbubur Rahman quote Alan Turing as saying: "This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be."
Perhaps, one possible adaptation of the epigraphed gloves in this setting could be, the places contemporary art is yet to go, the expectations it is yet to exceed in their ideation, execution and most of all—in the way they make you feel, see and think.
The 8th Delhi Contemporary Art Week (DCAW) is on at Bikaner House till September 4.
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