Art for a digital age
Delhi’s venerable Triveni Kala Sangam gets with the times and continues its support of everything artistic. Amrita Singh visits its new digital art gallery
Aprojector, a large screen and six tiny screens that display a new photograph every few seconds. Say hello to the Triveni Digital Art Gallery, a small space dedicated to the promotion of digital art at the Triveni Kala Sangam in New Delhi. The Sangam is a hoary cultural hub, founded 78 years ago by Sundari K Shridharani, where equal opportunities thrived for dance, music, sculpture, painting (not to mention a legendary lowpriced café).
For Amar Krishnalal Shridharani, son of the late founder, the small room at the Sangam lying empty, despite multiple efforts to put it to good use, was an eyesore. The answer lay in digital art. “Digitisation is something no one can escape at this point. While there are artists who are creating all sorts of digital art, there aren’t enough spaces for them to display their work. This space is dedicated to encouraging them,” says Shridharani. Artists who are experimenting with and creating digital art now have a platform at Delhi’s premier cultural hub to get noticed and reach out to a larger audience. Whether it is photographs, graphic art or film, anything digital is welcome at Triveni Kala Sangam’s latest addition.
The Sangam has partnered with Kaleidoscope Digital Art (KDA), a not-for-profit organisation, to promote and run the digital art gallery. Founded by Varsha and Bobby Bedi, KDA aims to be a platform for artists experimenting with evolving technology to help create and present their work. Bobby Bedi, the founder of KDA says, “Digital art can be created and shared in the original by millions. KDA is committed to ensuring that artists, young and old, get an opportunity to share their digital vision.” KDA manages to do this by offering rent-free space for 15 days to artists looking for a place to display their work.
Mukta Ahluwalia, the curator, plans to build a vibrant creative community of artists and audiences that recognises the potential of technology in creating art. The art gallery will also host timely lecture series by artists to facilitate discussions around art that help enable artistic development.
Ongoing at the moment is the work of Masuram Ravikanth, a multi-disciplinary artist from Hyderabad who has a preference for audio-visual media and photography. He transforms photographs into a crisp and allegorical dialogue to pay tribute to the idea of multiple perspectives. His exhibition, titled “Slippery memories: unhinged histories”, comprises 451 images, which reconsider the idea of personal memories and our shared histories. The images come together to make up a collection of four digital works called “Romancing the Reminiscence 1 and 2”, the “Royal DictArt” series and “Spandolika”.
In Romancing the Reminiscence 1 and Royal DictArt series, he creates self-portraits using costumes and other conventional studio props. These are performative works suggestive of what went on in photo studios in the 1960s as he strikes different poses with a Taj Mahal backdrop. In Romancing the Reminiscence 2 and Spandolika, he manipulates early 20th-century archival images of India and portraits of children on rocking horses. His digital interventions lie in inserting images of iconic modern Indian art. Ravikanth successfully uses humour, irony and wit to invoke nostalgia, by looking back at his own life and the bygone era.
Another interesting aspect of his exhibit is a three-minute-long film titled “Lyrical Throb”, through which he explores his memories of growing up in rural Telangana. He does this by focusing on handloom weaving, with detailed and enlarged shots of the production process. The various machines, thread and the weaving come together to produce music that is rhythmic and reflective of the mechanical irony in handloom weaving. The monotonous, mundane and mechanical life of a weaver without a person in sight transforms this piece of documentation into abstract art. The fact that the film is played on loop through the day reinforces the monotony and strengthens the artistic point.
‘Slippery memories: unhinged histories’ is on display till November 21 at Triveni Kala Sangam, New Delhi