Latitude 28 Makes A Debut At India Art Summit With Vietnamese Artists And A Baroda Flavour August 18, 2009

All set to make a splash in the second edition of India Art Summit, art curator and historian Bhavna Kakar brings forth an eclectic mix of artists under her new art venture Latitude 28. With an art education background from Baroda, it was expected that the curator-turned-gallerist would choose to represent some of the most interesting young Baroda artists during her first-time participation in the summit.
Baroda apart, what gives this exhibit a special place at the Summit is that it would be the only gallery showing works of the self-confessed homosexual Bhupen Khakhar whose famed portraiture work would be on display. In addition, Latitude 28 would also be showcasing Karachi-born artist and diva Nasreen Mohamedi’s pen and ink drawings on Japanese card paper, apart from bringing to India for the first time video works of three renowned Vietnamese artists.
Says Bhavna Kakar, curator & Director, Latitude 28: “India Art Summit is a wonderful platform to showcase the collection of our new venture, Latitude 28 and interact with the art fraternity. The gallery is committed to featuring evocative and challenging art in a variety of mediums and is happy to be able to introduce to the Indian art market different genres of not only Indian but international art practices. Besides showing veterans like Jogen Chowdhury, Bhupen Khakhar and Nasreen Mohamedi, our aim is to highlight new-age art by younger luminaries like Surekha and Prajjwal Choudhury.”
The artists at Latitude 28, Stall No. A04, India Art Summit are: Jogen Chowdhury, Bhupen Khakhar, Nasreen Mohamedi, Sonia Mehra Chawla, Prajjwal Choudhury, Rajesh Ram, Surekha, , Arunkumar HG, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Phu Nam Thuc Ha and Thi Trinh Nguyen.
While both Bhupen Khakhar and Nasreen Mohamedi were associated with M.S.University, Baroda, the latter in the capacity of a teacher, the aesthetics in their work is unique to each.
Honoured with the Padma Shri in 1984, Bhupen Khakhar was a self-taught artist, who quit the flourishing profession of chartered accountancy to move to Baroda, against the wishes of his family members. Despite the lack of a formal training, Khakhar started mapping his own peculiar style gorging on the kitsch aesthetic of the streets and households of Gujarat. Later, his paintings increasingly turned towards the theme of homosexuality in a largely conservative Indian society. Some of his paintings at the Summit, titled Portrait, Big Head and The Banyan Tree, unleash the artist’s mirthful take on sexuality and society.
Unlike Khakhar’s bold, figurative canvases, Nasreen Mohamedi’s style is known to be subtle and abstract. Her last major exposition was at Documenta, Germany. The gallery has selected black and white geometrical drawings from Mohamedi’s body of work which beautifully complement Khakhar’s colourful palette.
Born in Karachi in 1937, Nasreen was known for her Zen-like minimalist accent from the very start of her career. In the 60s and 70s, she was perhaps one of the few women in the exclusive male domain of high modernism in India striving to evolve a distinct aesthetic vocabulary of her own. She is often associated with the Minimalist artist Agnes Martin whose quality of works are defined by the pristine textural touches arranged along the gridded lines carefully drawn by hand invoking effect of hand weaving. Though much is not known about the early works of the artist who passed away in 1990, her poetic diary entries have been the main source of assimilating strands of her vision. Nasreen’s diary notes make mention of interactions with artists like V.S. Gaitonde and Tyeb Mehta at the Bhulabhai Desai Institute who made a profound impact on her. In 1971, when she joined the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda as a teaching staff, interactions with Jeram Patel, who also in his own distinct ways was fathoming an abstract style, mustered strength for extending her own practice.
Women Exposing her Teeth is the title of the work by yet another veteran Jogen Chowdhury who has been widely acknowledged as the master of the unbroken line. The figure is the prominent source of most of his works. Jogen Chowdhury’s ability to juxtapose contrary emotions, the real and imaginary and the known and unknown, make his art not only a form of self expression but a reflection of a collective and subjective consciousness.
While these exclusive paintings of veterans are aimed to attract attention of avid art collectors, video works from the younger artists are equally promising. Says Bhavna Kakar: “The videos will be showcased in the video lounge during the summit and bear a context specific to their nation. But in a global society, where each is striving for peace and progress, realizing the concerns and aesthetic idiom of this militarily stirred region becomes vital in the process.”
For instance, artist Thi Trinh Nguyen from Vietnam presents a video work titled Spring Comes Winter After 2009 that observes the funeral of Le Dat. (A Vietnamese poet who was part of a 1950s literary and intellectual movement in Northern Vietnam called ‘Nhan Van-Giai Pham’, which criticized life under communism. He was later banned from publishing for three decades, and it was not until 2007 that the Vietnamese government decided to grant him a prestigious national award in an effort to reconcile the grievances of the past.) Explains the artist: “As the avant-garde artists like this poet were forced to be silent, Vietnamese art and literature suffered decades of decay. In this short documentary film, the camera focuses on the grief of those in attendance of the funeral of this celebrated poet, many of whom are Vietnam’s contemporary established writers and intellectuals.” Thi’s camera however rolls time in reverse, the procession of people reverentially moving around Le Dat’s coffin depicted in rewind. This reversal of time could refer to Thi’s many interviews with Le Dat before he died where he once said that it was a common feeling among many of his generation that youth was completely lost and wasted away. By reversing time in Spring comes Winter after, Thi wishes his youth to be returned to him.
Vietnamese video artists Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Phu Nam Thuc Ha create a joint video projection with the word Uh... written as a graffiti tag on various public walls throughout Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. As passersby stroll past and traffic whizzes along the streets, a realization sinks in that being viewed is a suggestive trail that meanders across strategically focused detailed images of various government compound walls in Ho Chi Minh City. This work explores not only Vietnam's shifting landscapes, both cultural and physical, but also questions the reality of change.
Exploring the similar genre of video art is Three Fragmented Actions of Silence by Surekha that depicts an autobiographical transition from the real self to image. Divided into two horizontal frames, the top half of the video contains the artist taking out rose petals one by one from her mouth and pasting it to the actual stem, as if creating flower is a humane act. In the lower half, it is the same reverse scene in negative of eating petals, tilted up side down. The dual positive & negative image of the artist eating & recreating a flower echoes in the veiling and unveiling of her face. Her other video titled Bhagirathi Bringing Water, shot within a domestic space, transgresses to make a real, living space into immediate metaphoric artistic location. Here, the protagonist is in a bath tub and is facing the trail posed by the lonely and nostalgic camera, and desires to picturize that which was stored in the memories of one’s childhood.
Apart from the video works, an interesting collage of paintings and installations by other young artists are equally noteworthy. For example, Sonia Mehra Chawla’s mixed media on canvas titled Membrane is about an ongoing debate between the individual and the constantly changing urban locations. The display of her 8.5ft by 5ft sized work is a prelude to Sonia’s upcoming solo show in Mumbai. Her work essentially investigates and explores layers and complexities that are manifest within the urban and the biomorphic. The forms are at once generative and sensuous, macabre and degenerate, opulent and awe-inspiring and carry within them the force of the living and the vulnerability of decay. The vein-like trees and skeletal cow in the work become a metaphor for the pain of mindless urbanization.
Coming to the genre of installations, artist Arunkumar H.G’s work is a 3-feet tall Superman which he calls The Super B. Trained as a sculptor from Baroda, Arunkumar works in various disciplines, including photography and toy design. His use of readymade objects such as toys, plastic, ceramics, cow dung, hay and TV monitors gives us a glimpse of his susceptibility towards the neo-pop movement. His toy-like, yet intricate sculptural works often convey a simple message. Sometimes, however, Arunkumar switches the dynamics of this relationship, creating works that physically appear basic, but convey a complex message quite contrary to their appearance.
Artist Prajjwal Choudhury in his work titled Everything has been done before, but we would like to go back and begin all over again, sets up a recycling machine apparently operating as a kinetic conditioned to reprocess and reproduce matchboxes. He says: “There will be 2000 match boxes placed inside the mixer which will be falling on a moving steel plate. All the match boxes will be accumulated together and once the mixer is empty they will go back into the mixer by vacuum process so the process of recycling begins.” It is obvious that Prajjwal is at war with the way in which everyday objects are taken for granted. He gathers his preliminary fuel from such objects like matchboxes to engineer his thought-provoking creations. These matchboxes filled in the recycling machine carry a realistic visual appeal, but with a wry humor, deceiving the onlooker. The cover of the matchboxes carries images of the works of the world-famous artists-Andy Warhol, Picasso, Damien Hirst, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, Dhruva Mistry, Jitish Kallat, Subodh Gupta and Atul Dodiya.
On the other hand, Rajesh Ram aptly weaves his aesthetic configurations with deadpan satire in his work tilted Pothi padhi padhi jag muah pandit hua na koye dhai akshar prem ke pade so pandit hoye. Made out of tangible objects like books, the artist manipulates their shapes to delineate hearts accentuated from their background, enunciating the saga of love and tolerance in a bigoted society. The artist also in an uncanny way gears up to promote the national language Hindi’s proverbial bywords by stressing on its meaningful connotation.
LATITUDE 28 is a new venture under the direction of Bhavna Kakar, a Delhi-based expert in Modern and Contemporary Art with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Committed to giving a platform to young talent, LATITUDE 28 encourages broad-based practices ranging from painting and sculpture, to photography, video and installations.
By anticipating trends and spotting latent talent, LATITUDE 28 is committed to host not only exhibitions in the white cube of a gallery space, but also by supporting residencies, outreach programs, seminars, and talks. Take on art! is the art magazine launched under the same banner, a bold initiative in today’s recessionary times that sets Latitude 28 apart from the regular commercial set up.
LATITUDE 28 has exhibited an eclectic mix of contemporary artists like Justin Ponmany, Atul Bhalla, Prajakta Palav, Manjunath Kamath, George Martin, Sandeep Pisalkar, Farhad Hussain, Binu Bhaskar, Niyeti Chadha, Sakshi Gupta, Minal Damani, Apurba Nandi, Pooja Iranna, Alok Bal, and seniors like Bhupen Khakhar, Nasreen Mohamedi, Ganesh Haloi, Prabhakar Kolte, G R Santosh amongst others in India and international venues like Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai and London.