BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL
TO QUESTION. TO PROTEST. TO COMMENT. TO CHOOSE. THE INDIA TODAY ART AWARDS 2018 HONOURED ARTISTS WHO EXERCISED THEIR CREATIVITY TO NOT JUST CREATE BUT ALSO TO COMMENT ON OUR TIMES
India Today salutes artists who have created not just works of art but a whole new medium of expression
Like a teenager allowed out for his first party, veteran artist Manu Parekh asked, “Can I bring my friends? I have a lot of friends here.” The 78-year-old did bring his friends along, but it wasn’t just they who cheered as the Bengali-speaking Gujarati from Delhi won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the India Today Art Awards 2018—held on December 21 in association with The India Story, an annual four-day arts festival in Kolkata. “I spent 10 years of my life here. I came to Kolkata when I was 25 and within a week I became a Calcuttan. Within six months, I was a member of the Society of Contemporary Artists, Kolkata, and remain one to this day,” said Parekh, an alumnus of the JJ School of Art, who’s inspired by “Tagore’s humanism”.
The evening was an occasion to celebrate the bold and the brave. Aroon Purie, chairman and editor-in-chief of the India Today Group, as well as awards jury member, described art as “not decorative or demure but one that is compelled to tell the truth”. Other members of the jury were Vasant Valley School chairperson and collector Rekha Purie; hotelier-writer Aman Nath; chief curator of the Al Thani Collection Amin Jaffer, Neotia Arts Trust managing trustee and The India Story
founder Madhu Neotia; curator Nada Raza; chairperson of Apeejay Surrendra Park Hotels Priya Paul and The India Story convenor Swapan Seth.
“Well-behaved people rarely make history and wellbehaved artists rarely make good art,” quipped Purie as the audience chuckled in agreement. “From the caustic commentary on the state of the republic by the brilliant Jitish Kallat to the recapturing of the trauma of Partition and Kashmir by the supremely talented Nilima Sheikh; from Zuleikha Chaudhari’s view of the artist’s role in the making of public policy to Amar Kanwar’s imaginary gradual blindness as a social choice, the awards celebrated art that stepped out of the confines of decorum and propriety.
“We have been seeing an ideological tyranny and criminalisation of our society. I had been dreaming about making a film about this in a non-aggressive way. It’s been a long journey and I am grateful for the support of colleagues and Kiran Nadar in what seemed to be a film about collective blindness and a way to get out of it,” said Kanwar on receiving the award for New Media Artist of the Year. Kanwar and Jitish Kallat, who won the award for solo exhibition of the year, were the rockstars of the art world, receiving the
loudest cheers from the audience. Kallat, whose solo exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art was included in The New York Times ‘Best of Art 2017’, said, “I started this year with this immense project that spanned 100 works, over 25 years of my career that was spread out over two buildings. I call it a retro-prospective in the sense that it was retrospective because I was looking back but also exploring the future, so in that way prospective too. So it feels doubly special to end the year by winning this award with colleagues of this calibre, in what has become a convergence point for the arts scene in India.”
For the public art initiative, the jury chose the Bihar Museum in Patna. Built at an estimated cost of Rs 500 crore, on a “campus” that is spread across 5.3 hectares, the museum has multiple history galleries, a contemporary art and temporary exhibition gallery, a regional art gallery that is a tribute to the cultures of Mithila, Bhojpur, Magahi and Angika areas, a diaspora gallery that focuses on the migration history of indentured labourers and their subsequent relocation, and a children’s gallery. It is one of the most ambitious projects undertaken by a state. “We have tried to highlight our heritage. To develop into a powerful nation, one must also develop ‘soft power’ and provide a platform where art can flourish,” said Bihar chief secretary Anjani Kumar Singh, the man behind the idea.
Other winners included Annapurna Garimella, (Curator of the Year), Kiran Nadar (Collector of the Year), N.S. Harsha (Retrospective Exhibition of the Year), Nikhil Chopra (Performance Artist of the Year); Radha Mahendru and Zuleikha Chaudhari for their work Landscape as Evidence: Artist as Witness (Best Artistic Collaboration of the Year) and Nilima Sheikh (Artist of the Year). “As artists, we respond to the times we live in and our surroundings. Sometimes it can be very precise like ours, or abstract like Kanwar’s,” said theatre director Zuleikha Chaudhari whose work questions perceptions of memory and identity.
The process of creating art was discussed in conversations hosted by Aman Nath with two artist couples over two discussions. While artists and partners Shuvaprasanna and Shipra Bhattacharya talked about “art, work and life”, Mithu Sen and Samit Das talked about “shared spaces and shared lives”. The evening ended with a presentation celebrating bold ambition and sheer beauty—a curated collaboration between 15 designers and artists. Designers were asked to create fashion as an interpretation of art; it was not only an interplay of thread and fabric but also the forging of a unique narrative of fashion in art and art in fashion.
“Art is meant to inspire and this year we collapse the boundaries of art and applied art and have some of the finest fashion designers showing us how—with specially hand-crafted, singular outfits, made for the India Today Art Awards. Each outfit is a work of art, inspired by a fragment of memory or history, the fluid lines of Jamini Roy’s depiction of women, or the audacious curves of Zaha Hadid buildings; the geometrical abstracts of S.H. Raza’s paintings or the notes of Beethoven’s music,” explained Purie.
Two artists from Bengal—Jamini Roy and Mrinalini Mukherjee—inspired designers David Abraham and Rakesh Thakore and Gaurav Jai Gupta, respectively. Other participating designers and their muses included designer Arjun Saluja and industrial and visual designer Avian D’Souza; Paromita Banerjee, inspired by Sri Lankan painter Senaka Senanayake; Samant Chauhan, who found inspiration in the terracotta works of Rajat Ghosh. Hemang Aggarwal chose Raza, Aneeth Arora interpreted Pierre-Joseph Redouté and Sanjay Garg came up with a take on Nasreen Mohamedi. Kallol Datta used constructivism; Anita Dongre Pichhwai art; Anamika Khanna was inspired by ethnographic motifs; and Kiran Uttam Ghosh chose the fifth taste, Umami.
“The finest art forces us to question everything, accept nothing, and believe in the possibility of everything,” said Purie. On this starry evening, art, indeed, made everything seem possible.