This week, don’t miss on these shows that draw from familial and community experiences by two young and exciting artists on Mumbai’s art scene
The Golden Glove. Pics Courtesy/Art and Charlie
Nurturing is feminist
In her first solo show Dear Tereza at Art and Charlie — one that gallerist Ayesha Parikh calls their most ambitious exhibition yet — artist Saviya Lopes delves into a conversation about matrilineal culture, womanhood and acts of resistance propelled by one question — “Who gets to be called a non-feminist?” Lopes asks.
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The five years she spent documenting her grandmother — and the show’s eponymous muse, Tereza — gave Lopes the chance to navigate thoughts that most of us might find all too familiar. Illustrating these thoughts, Lopes explains that women of past generations, while adhering to certain patriarchal norms still grappled with creating safe spaces for themselves and their communities. How can we disregard those acts that nurtured subsequent generations, their new ideas and courage? Through acts of resistance that include this nurturing, 28-year-old Lopes highlights care as an act of feminism.
(Left) Exhibition views of Vessels of Care; (right) To You I Owe.
The show is presented through 37 artworks including lightboxes, sculptures, drawings stitched on fabric, installations and a comprehensive, yet in-progress, book. Like the casts of the grandmother’s and mother’s hands and the embroidered sketches of hands at work — cooking and stitching — demonstrate how women take care of their communities. The spaces that held these acts in turn become a site of resistance and solitude.
As a reflection of this emotional labour, there is traditionally homemade red wine aged and stored in glass bottles and baranis (storage jars). A hand-cast covered in honeycomb with bees peppered through the show further reflects the extent of this labour’s presence at home and in the outside world, likening it to bee pollination.
Saviya Lopes
Coming to the altar of sculptures of body parts, To You I Owe, Niccolò Moscatelli, Italy-based artist and curator delineates in the curatorial note, “It is culture incarnated and passed through generations of women. As the body is the [primary] vessel of this matrilineal thread, it becomes an object of worship to Lopes.”
Till May 20 Time 11 am to 8 pm (Tuesday to Sunday) AT Art and Charlie, 71A Pali Village, Bandra West.
A visual conversation
Bringing a larger sense of dynamism into the gallery space, Amol K Patil’s Black Masks on Roller Skates is built through sculptures, kinetic installations, drawings, holographic video, poetry and performance seamlessly to create what he tells us is an entire installation in itself. His upcoming solo exhibition at Project 88 is an excerpt of Patil’s larger exhibition at documenta fifteen in 2022 at Kassel, Germany. He shares, “At documenta fifteen, the show was a larger conversation about my whole community, and how they travelled from Konkan to Kolhapur, to Bombay which draws from my grandfather’s and father’s archives. My grandfather was a Powada (a traditional protest art form) singer and performer, and wrote poetry, while my father, Kisan Patil, a theatre activist.”
S10, Bronze Sculpture. Pics Courtesy/Patil and Project 88 (right) D19, Ink and water-based paint on MDF Plywood
Drawing from memories of when he encountered a single script, along with cassettes of immigrant dialects put together by his father who passed away when he was still a child, Patil tells us, “When I read my father’s script that was biographical of the community and when you engage with it, too, you will realise that he never wrote about one person but many through the narration of one person.” Patil does the same through his artistic practice calling it his individual protest that talks about the experiences of the Dalit community. “His work addresses the oppression built into urban cities in order to imagine spaces of resistance,” says Sree Goswami, director of Project 88.
Amol K Patil
The 36-year-old artist will highlight this in artworks that include map lines similar to a cut-out of Google Maps, bronze sculptures, drawings and a kinetic installation that will see sand moving as if breathing to showcase the journey of his people and the stories that continue to live in memory, legacy and reality, as well as a performance where he collaborates with young Powada writers and the Yalgaar Sanskrutik Manch to recreate and present a live rendering of his grandfather’s poems. Patil speaks about the visual translation of his work: “The overall project uses the materials through which I feel I can speak about my community, their freedom, separation and its other aspects. It’s a loud conversation that continues today with my generation,” Patil signs off.
Starts March 23, 6 pm to 9 pm Till April 29; performance on March 30 at 6 pm At Project 88, Colaba.
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