3 art works that made a mark at the India Art Fair 2024

Eva Jospin and Karishma Swali at the India Art Fair 2024.

The 15th India Art Fair in Delhi added a new design section. As usual, there were also outdoor projects and talks. A digital segment carried forward from previous editions, too. It was a large fair, and there were many reasons to lose track of time. Here's a quick takeaway list of the bigger and more impactful exhibits from the art fair that ended on February 4.

1. Recall (AI), by LN Tallur

It breaks your heart sometimes to know that a piece of art has been sold to a private collector, and may never be seen in public again - sculptor LN Tallur's Recall AI (bronze; 63 x 19x 72 inches) has joined that list, according to Mumbai's Chemould Art Gallery representatives at the fair.

At the risk of oversimplifying it, the piece looks like a hybrid of a five-foot Nataraj sculpture and a julep/cocktail strainer. Tallur, who has an MFA in museology from MSU Baroda and an MA in contemporary art practice from Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, has engaged with artificial intelligence before, in Deep Learning PI - a set of sculptures that capture the difficulty of training AI on vast quantities of data.

Recall AI looks at another aspect of working with AI - how often it produces correct answers.

A note on the piece simply defines recall as: "Given a set of results from a processed document, recall is the percentage value that indicates how many correct results have been retrieved based on the expectations of the application. It can apply to any class of a predictive AI system such as search, categorisation and entity recognition." It's a bit meta that the gallery takes this definition from an online source (expert.ai), and reproduces it without attribution - a bit like generative AI that draws on multiple sources without giving them credit for ideas or turn of phrase.

The sculpture itself is head-turning, and mechanistic - as if mimicking a world in which AI is infecting everything, even artistic practice.

2. Above Within Beyond

It was impossible not to turn around and look at American art furniture legend Wendell Castle's Above Within Beyond bronze chair at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery booth in the India Art Fair's inaugural design section. Made in 2014, the sculptural chair comprises four "pillars" (instead of legs) and a sort of bucket seat. It's large and bold; throne-like. Sensuous in the way that it renders fluidity in metal, it is also rather phallic.

Carpenters Workshop were showing art furniture in India for the first time, and there were many moving and conceptual pieces to see. Case in point: Vincent Dubourg’s "exploding" aluminium desk (Commode Inner Vortex Alu; 2013). Described by the gallery as a "deconstructed, gravity-defying cabinet", it's a stunning piece in gunmetal grey that marries those two key principles at the heart of art furniture: functionality and concept. Beyond these cerebral concerns, though, the piece evokes worlds - depending on your mood on the day, you could see a comment on a world at war on multiple fronts or a whimsical take on cabinets as places to secret away some things and display others.

Wendell Castle's Above Within Beyond bronze chair at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery booth in the India Art Fair.

3. Embroidered forests by Eva Jospin x Chanakya School of Craft

The first thing you saw when you walked into the India Art Fair's inaugural design section, were two embroidered "forests". Each of the works, by French artist Eva Jospin and Karishma Swali's Chanakya School of Craft in Mumbai, took roughly 2,000 hours to make, and comprise 400-plus colours to emulate the colours in nature. Jospin said embroidery - as opposed to tapestry, which is constrained by a predetermined design - brought more flexibility to the work.

The first of these works, recessed in a window cut out of cardboard, appears to be the entry to a secret garden embroidered with silk, jute linen and cotton threads in blues, greens and browns - reminiscent of expensive shawls.

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Chanakya has been India's embroidery studio for the world's biggest fashion brands from Versace and Gucci to Prada for the last 40 years. In 2023, Chanakya made a big splash with the Dior show in Mumbai. Now, Jospin and Chanakya have together created forest-inspired works in cardboard and embroidery.

Also in the booth were artworks by students of the craft school. The works depicting women, often caring for young ones, had multiple eyes taking in the world around them. Made with raw, unprocessed jute, the textural, evocative, were are on-brand for the Chanakya School of Craft.