Gallery Espace participates in the first-ever Asian Contemporary Art Fair, Miami

Gallery Espace participates in the first-ever Asian Contemporary Art Fair, Miami

With Miami poised to host its first-ever international Asian contemporary art fair called ART ASIA from December 4, 2008 to December 7, 2008, one of Delhi’s leading galleries Gallery Espace announces its participation by taking work of three bright artists steadily climbing up the charts. Art Asia, Miami is slated to take place in the prestigious Wynwood Art District, located on NE 31st Street and Midtown Boulevard.

As the fair is a celebration of contemporary Asian art as a worldwide phenomenon, Gallery Espace has carefully selected works of three contemporary Indian artists to showcase at their booth. Works to be showcased at Art Asia Miami include NeoCamouflage, a new media installation by Vibha Galhotra, photographs from Ravi Agarwal’s latest series An Other Place, and satirical works on canvas and paper by Manjunath Kamath.

VIBHA GALHOTRA

Vibha Galhotra, Neo-Camouflage(Installation with digital prints, life-size mannequins & Fabric, 2008)

New Delhi based artist Vibha Galhotra is an ardent catcher of double speak. For her the urban sites are the realms of this double speak; they speak of progress and sell a Utopian dream. Each Utopia within it carries a dystopia, a suppressed zone of miseries and chaos. The fast pace of globalization and corporatization makes the individual in a society so giddy that he/she fails to realize these hints and double meanings.

In her work titled 'Camouflage' (and also 'Neo-Camouflage') we see the pictures of urban shanties becoming camouflaged clothes of the man living in peripheries. Camouflaging is a technique of survival for the lesser beings. But, seen in a different context, it is the uniform of power/state/army. Vibha uses this double meaning of camouflage as a medium and source to express how the people in peripheries are succumbed to their own shanty-ness.

RAVI AGARWAL

Ravi Agarwal, (From the series An Other Place, Archival Inkjet Prints, 2008)

Trained as an engineer and an environmentalist in the non-governmental sector, Ravi works tirelessly to suggest constructive ways in which burgeoning 'development' in the city can interact with the 'natural'. As a documentary photographer, Ravi's focus has been on environmental and labour issues and the changing face of urbanity. In bringing together the 'found' and the 'constructed', in the series of composite images-'Urbanscapes', and 'Mechanical Man', Metal Man', Ravi expands the possibilities offered by the photographic lens. The documentary and the performative collaborate in images that speak of dislocation, the alienation of the self, and the loss contained in uninhibited contemporary urban development. Delhi, the city that Ravi inhabits, seems eager to shed its past in its urgent pursuit of the future. As the city's richly layered histories are replaced by a temperamental commercial plasticity, Ravi's images serve as a residue of that which will soon be lost forever. However, the vibrant colours of the natural world seep into these photographs of desolate spaces and abandoned debris converting them into images of hope rather than loss.

'An Other Place' offers, as the title of the series suggests, an alternative space, a site that yearns to re-establish relationships with the organic, with that which is less ephemeral, a place where there is the possibility of "rediscovering a personal ecology".

MANJUNATH KAMATH

Manjunath Kamath, Igo Icons (Watercolour on paper, 16.5 x 14 in each (a set of 6))

Manjunath Kamath is a chronicler of our times. Like a skilful historian, he creates visual stories, constantly bringing images from the past and present. He, in his works traverses through memories, culturally accumulated visual facts and collective consciousness. Trained in sculpture and visual design, Manjunath in a sense designs his works with a lot of theatricality. Disparate images are culled from folk stories and maxims only to be juxtaposed with the familial and the familiar images.

By contrasting and juxtaposing images, Manjunath creates a visual vocabulary, which is particularly fresh in the Indian contemporary art scene. He narrates history with a jester's wisdom and vision. Lampoons and satires a play a predominant part in his works and this kind of trivializing of the past and the immediate becomes a powerful tool in Manjunath's hands for generating a visual discourse that goes against the norms of high-brow-ist aesthetic negotiations. A rebel in thoughts and creativity, Manjunath presents one of the unique features of Indian contemporary art.

Art Asia attempts to highlights the impact of Asian art on the art market in the U.S. and Europe and shows how over the past decade, artists from China, Japan, India, and South Korea have become among the most important of their generation, with major museum exhibitions, auctions, and wide media coverage. Art Asia aims to communicate the rich and exciting experience of South Asian Arts to the widest possible audience.