Exhibition Title: A Walk of Art
Participating Artists: B Padma Reddy, Chandan Roy, Farhad Tamkanat, Pavan Kumar D, Dr Priti Samyukta, Swathi & Vijay
Curator: Atiya Amjad
Gallery: Daira Centre for Arts and Culture
Curator’s Note: This exhibition, in the form of installations, is an attempt to show the audience the private space of an artist who is constantly experimenting and creating visual dialogues. The artist will share the source of her/his inspiration that guides and motivates them to create what they create. This curatorial attempt is an opportunity to bring to the fore not only the finished works of the participating artists but also exhibit ‘works in progress’ such as sketchbooks, maquettes, materials, tools, personal letters, books, music, exchanged works, selective collections and many such elements that have the personal bearing of the artist. The exhibition familiarises the audiences with the artists in a studio setup and also acquaints them with various creative processes.
Exhibition Title: Places My Chair Likes to Go
Artist: Salil Chaturvedi
What happens when a wheelchair begins desiring? And what if it develops topophilia? Places My Chair Likes To Go is a photographic work that imagines such an eventuality of a desiring machine. Embedded in a variety of natural surroundings, the wheelchair takes on the form of an experiencing entity and acquires the naturalness of its surroundings; it becomes something that is almost expected in a landscape. The work asks the viewers to undertake a journey of becoming-wheelchair. At a time when persons with disabilities are still largely missing from spaces—literary, social, political and cultural—the photographs make present this absence through the artifice of an empty wheelchair. Employing a playful visual language, the work seeks to make supple the notion of a wheelchair, taking it away from the lifeless blue-and-white signages in public areas to a breathing, desiring persona, inclined to the outdoors. It inverts the problematic and overused phrase ‘wheelchair bound’ to a celebratory condition of an unbounded wheelchair.
Exhibition & Workshop Title: Kaavi Art: The Konkan Visual Form
Artist: Nirmala Shenoy, contemporary artist and promoter of Kaavi art
Kaavi Art or Kaavi Kale is an elaborate form of wall mural etching and painting. The art form depicted geometrical designs in murals on the walls of temples, as well as floral designs in churches and some ancestral homes in Goa. In temples, this art was used to depict mythological and historical themes on the exterior walls. This art was invented by the artists of the Konkan region to suit the tropical climatic condition. Some of the murals on the walls have withstood years of extreme rainfall and summer heat. The art spread along the Konkan coast of Dakshina Kannada when the Hindus fled from Goa around the 16th century and settled in this region.
Exhibition Title: Under the Chevella Banyans: An Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings, Installations, and Photographs
Participating Artists: Anil Janakam, Aditya Kulkarni, Ashutosh Patwardan, Avani Rao Gandra, Ajit Nathaniel, Prashant Peteri, Arnab Biswas, Debabrata Biswas, Arvind Chenji, Devanshi Damani, Haripriya V, Hansa Milan Kumar, Jahgaiah Polepogu, Ravi Kumar P, Karunakar, Madhu Kurva, Manjula Dubey, Manikanth, Maredu Ramu, Namratha Bothra, Naresh Bollu, Oxana Srikanth, Prasad P.C, Prashant Peteri, Priyam Chatterjee, Raghu Akula, Ramesh Sunkoji, Satyaprasad Yachendra, Sabita Lakshmanan, Saraswathi L, Shannu, Srikant Nippatla, Sasikanth V, Sandeep MVS, Snehal Kashikar
Curator: Avani Rao Gandra
Programme Collaborators: Sadhana Ramchander and Kobita Das
Gallery: ICONART Gallery
Curator’s Note: Thirty-five artists and photographers are focused on lending a vision to the cause of saving more than the 100-year-old 900 banyan trees near Chevella, a small hamlet on the outskirts of Hyderabad. They are highlighting the aesthetic, historical, heritage, environmental, and ecological aspects of these magnificent trees. The artworks are conceptual in nature exploring the symbolic, abstract, expressionistic, figurative, and photographic formats.
Exhibition Title: Willpower: Exhibition of Paintings
Artist: Rithik
Rithik is a twenty-year-old physically challenged artist. He displayed an interest in the visual arts at an early age and has been pursuing the interest for the past many years. He has acquired an understanding of the modern visual language and he draws and applies colours with his feet. From copying cartoons to creating landscapes, he has come a long way. Besides painting animals and landscapes, he also depicts mythological characters and scenes. With finesse in the visual arts he dreams of a career in fine arts. The Kumawat Pahal Charitable Trust (KPCT) Foundation, a Mumbai-based non-profit organization, has been supporting artists like Rithik who have been impacted by autism, cerebral palsy, down’s syndrome, sensory processing disorders, and other disabilities. KPCT supports these artists by providing art material, training, and guidance to enhance their innate abilities. It also promotes their artworks through live art shows, media coverage, and awards.
Exhibition Title: The Nocturnal Dialogues: The Darkroom Project
Artists: School Children from the MPSF Confederation of Charminar Budget Schools
Curator: Atika Amjad
Gallery: The Children’s Fine Art Gallery
Curator’s Note: The Children’s Fine Art Gallery has been installing the dark room gallery project since 2018, during its annual Children’s Art Festival. The displays are accompanied by music which involves the viewer completely in the space. An electric torch is handed over to the spectator to view the images. Such viewing involves the viewer completely in the image and an interface is created by questions posted at the foot of the artwork, enhancing the viewing and the comprehension experience intended in the display.
For HLF 2023, the Children’s Fine Art Gallery has taken inspiration from an Iranian artist, Maryam Ashkanian’s Sleep series. These embroidered works are sensitive dialogues of the nocturnal hours. Drawings sued on pillows have given a new direction to the MPSF school children who created works inspired by the artist. All exhibits of the Darkroom Project are taken from public domain and applied for educational purposes only.
Exhibition Title: Sound Installation: Project ZZZNZZZ
Artist: Nithin Shamsudhin
Project Supported by: The Serendipity Arts Foundation
Concept Note: Musician and sound artist Nithin Shamsudhin is interested in creating listening spaces that allow for altered perception(s). Subverting the dominant ocular-visual modes, Nithin is interested in creating/inviting experiences that propose ‘listening’ as a practice of opening portals to disarm preconceived ways of thinking-being-perceiving. The artist asks himself and his audience, “Can I listen without the influence of my internal dialogue? Can I listen to sounds outside of myself by trying to settle into the silence within?” Memory, experience, and sound become interlinked for Nithin as he documents and composes a common phenomenon that he would remember from childhood. He speaks about wanting to challenge “regular modes of listening”, and through his sound installations, improvisations, and compositions, the artist seeks to create shifts in awareness and dissolve the space between the self and the other.
Exhibition Title: Flying Embers
Artists: Katharina Holstein-Sturm (visual artist) & Jameela Nishat (Poet)
Concept Note: Jameela Nishat, a poet from India, and Katharina Holstein-Sturm, a visual artist from Germany, combine their creative forces. The outcomes are unique: An artist-book, with Jameela´s poetry and Katharina´s artwork. Together they select the poems and the artwork and discuss how they should be combined until the outcome rings true and transcend both their work. As artists, as women, they perceive the world and their place in it. They feel the need for change, many things are worth fighting for. They fight with poetry and art. Coming from different continents, and from different cultural backgrounds, both find a common ground in the cause to better the position of women. They point out domestic and sexual violence, oppression, and financial and emotional dependency. The viewers get drawn into the artist-book differently. The turning of the page engages them, they can set the pace of perceiving the artwork, partly reading, partly looking at the drawings.
Exhibition Title: How Do I Show the Ocean Space You Carried Inside You?
Artists: Bharati Kapadia (Designer and visual artist), Abeer Khan (Filmmaker and Photographer)
How Do I Show The Ocean Space You Carried Inside You? is an independent film by Bharati Kapadia and Abeer Khan. The series of 10 poster prints exhibited under this title is an offshoot of, and an addendum to, the film. Each print consists of a quote by Bhadrakant Zaveri and an artwork by the artist Bharati Kapadia, the two protagonists of the film. Like the shake of a kaleidoscope, each print transforms the pattern and brings before us different facets of the experiences and concerns essayed by the two artists – protagonists.
Exhibition Title: The Qawwali Photo Project – An Untold Story
Photographers: Dinesh Khanna, Mustafa Quraishi, Leena Kejriwal
Concept by: Manjari Chaturvedi
Supported by: Sufi Kathak Foundation
The Qawwali Photo Project is the first-ever photo documentation and exhibition on Qawwali. It is a meticulously conceptualized initiative where the untold story of Qawwali unfolds through the lens of the photographers. The practitioners of Qawwali are photo-documented—their performances, their lives, and their association with the Sufi shrines where they perform. The images of practitioners with their families, in their everyday lives, and in their interaction with audiences and the pulsating connect of energy between them. The Qawwals become the voice of the prayers of the hundreds of devotees that throng the shrine, seeking grace. With this project, we seek to bring forth interesting perspectives as captured through the mind and lens, with respect to the cultural and social dimensions of the art form that unfold like pages from a visual story.
This Exhibition is in collaboration with Sufi Kathak Foundation and Nazar Foundation.
Exhibition Title: Saga of the Qutb Shahi Baolis
Project: Restoration of Baolis, Qutb Shahi Heritage Park Hyderabad, India
Project credit: Aga Khan Trust for Culture in partnership with Department of Heritage Telangana, and Quli Qutb Shah Urban Development Authority
Supported by: US Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation, and Tata Trusts
The six major baolis or stepwells from the 16th century found across the 106-acre Qutb Shahi Heritage Park site are significant structures, attached to the mausoleum to irrigate the garden orchards. With the collapse or filling-in of these stepwells, the orchards died out by the 19th century. Reconstruction of the collapsed Badi Baoli, with the support of the Tata Trusts, required over 600 cum of stone masonry over three years. Here master craftsmen worked with traditional materials – granite stone and lime mortar to reconstruct the baoli to its original details. During 2020-22, supported by a grant from the US Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation, conservation works have been completed on the remaining five major stepwells. An important objective of the conservation of the stepwells was to ensure these structures once again fulfil the function of rainwater collection and collect the water required for conservation works and irrigation. The stepwells now collect 20 million litres of rainwater, making it possible to irrigate the restored orchards and the forests planted at the site’s northern, southern and western edges.
This exhibition is in collaboration with Hyderabad on Wheels. Hyderabad on Wheels, a unique first- of its kind initiative of Indian Photo Festival (IPF) in association with TSRTC, is a photo exhibition on the wheels. This moving photo gallery goes around city’s high footfall areas, schools and colleges to create awareness about photography and it’s importance as a powerful story telling medium.
