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Indian Art Forum
Galerie station
Mousonturm, Waldschmidtstraße 4, Frankfurt 

Opening: Wed 11 March 09, 8 pm, Musik: Indian Vibes, Visuals: 20dre, C.U.Eye

12 March to 12 April 09

The international exhibition „Indian Art Forum” shows current positions of young second generation Asians, living in Germany, Great Britain, Egypt, Austria and the USA. They grew up with the rich background of both cultures, now using their potential in various artistic fields.

In 2006 Indian Vibes presented digital art created by British-Asians artists at Galerie station. 2007 Sandip Shah showed „Bombay Connection“ at the b.k.i. So the idea came up to put a show together.

Thanks to Annette Gloser for inviting us to curate the exhibition, to Ilze Black for the support and the Mousonturm team for the cooperation.





Vinita Agarwal (GB) 


Vinita Agarwal PortraitVinita Agarwal graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design achieving Masters Degree in Communication Design, in the pathway of Photography. Vinita is passionate about photography and works as freelance photographer in London. She has initiated a photography workshop with NGO based in Mumbai, which localises street children under addiction.

"The object of the workshop was to teach the children how to use photography as a new way of seeing, and changing perspective. My aims were to help change the stereotypical ways in which streetchildren have been perceived, and to show their capability through something creative such as this."

Vinita Agarwal was born in Mumbai. She grew up in Hong Kong and moved to England a decade ago.

Rhythm and Light in Indian Dance

Vnita Agarwal KathakVinita Agarwal's project aims to convey the traditional Indian dance form in a new light through photography. The focus here is on style of Indian dance:Kathak. By breaking down dance pieces into 20 second long exposures, Vinita aimed to convey the intricate relationship of the taal and laya. In no other major art form does time play such an important part as in Indian dance and music. Basic rhythm is described as taal, which is counted time, usually by the clapping of hands and this follows a structured pattern. This counted time is then further divided into subdivisions known as laya, which has strict rhythm and an ever-changing tempo according to the music piece. By attaching light sources to the hands and feet, the trails of movement are captured here within each time frame to communicate its precision.

www.vinitaagarwal.com



 

Chiraag Bhakta*
*Pardon My Hindi (USA)
 

Chiraag BhaktaBorn to parents who owned and lived in an independent motel off a New Jersey freeway, Chiraag Bhakta fostered an interest in the arts at an early age. After graduating from the Hartford Art School in 1999 with his BFA in graphic design, he moved to New York City where he worked at several publication houses and design studios working on print and web projects for various clients. After a couple years in the professional world, Chiraag trekked out on his own designing for clients under the name Life Here. At the same time Chiraag also started creating personal work under the moniker *PMH (*Pardon My Hindi.) He uses *PMH as a platform for creating South Asian pop culture. Along side the merchandise, like silkscreen posters and shirts, *PMH holds an online presence with the blog and an online magazine, titled ‘What’s the Samachar?’

Chiraag currently resides in San Francisco, California.

Some of the pieces shown:Fast Friends, Mumbai Smoke, Fantastic Sir, Strange Geometry.

www.lifehere.com
www.pardonmyhindi.com
www.pardonmyhindi.com/blog 

 


 
 

Karan Islania (GB)

Karan Islania PortraitKaran Islania graduated from Central St Martins College of Art and Design with a BA (Hons) in Fine Arts, specialising in the 4D pathway. He centres his practice around the moving image and specifically the craft of editing. Karan crosses genre and media in his investigation of sight, sound and the translation of the audible into the visual.

 

Bridge

Bridge is a 20 minute video montage inspired by the composer John Cage, in particular the concept of attempting to create a musical composition free of a single overwhelming climax. Lyrically, the ‘bridge’ in music is used to pause and reflect on the earlier portions of the song or to prepare the listener for the climax. Song and dance in film is unique to Indian cinema; these audible bridges have visual correspondences, which he has compiled into a audio-visual composition. According to the Hindu theory or art, a ‘Rasa’ is an emotion inspired in an audience by a performer. There are nine permanent emotions:  heroic, erotic, wondrous, tranquil, sorrow, odious, furious, terrible and mirthful. The montage expresses these emotions through a startling visual context:the art of Indian cinema.

 



 

Manoj Kurian Kallupurackal (G/ Egypt)

Manoj was born in Cologne, Germany in 1980. He began his studies at the Cologne International School of Design and went on to get his Bachelors in Media Design, majoring in interface and multimedia design, at the University of Bielefeld. In 2007 he finished his degree in communication design at the University of Applied Sciences in Bielefeld. He then moved to Cairo, where he and his long-time business partner Sagar Ghoting founded Kurian Ghoting LLC in 2008.

Besides his commercial work Manoj Kallupurackal designs and manages projects for Masala Movement, an intercultural artists collective, which was founded by him in 2003.

"As an Indian, born and brought up in Germany, I am especially attracted by the cultural diversity and growing importance of third-world countries. I am fascinated by the way tradition blends with the contemporary and I strongly believe in the idea of breaking barriers based on nationality so that people with different backgrounds and ethics can live together peacefully and work efficiently, respecting culture-specific distinctions and do this without forgetting their social responsibilities."

www.masala-movement.com
www.kurianghoting.com


 

 
Ashok Kapur(G)


Ashok Kapur was born in 1964 in Frankfurt. He studied architecture at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin and then sculpting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. Later he abandoned sculpting in favour of drawing. He now lives and works in Stuttgart.

Ashok Kapur’s work results from a spontaneous, consciously unreflected, innately shaped practice, a process, which stands in the tradition of the Automatism Theory of the Surrealists and the Process Art of the Informalists. Obviously the shapes created are not chaotic, but on the contrary they are organic, elementary natural forms, which are set around a centre – from which everything stems or everything flows back to. Relations are set up between shaped images within the inorganic, the macro- and microcosmic as well as the biological field. They are not set up “as nature’s parallels”, but develop ornamental objects between order and chaos, arbitrariness and parameter.

  

 


 
Sabahat Nawaz (GB)

Born in Pakistan, Sabahat studied at the renowned National College of Art &  Design in Lahore, obtaining a BA in Textile Design. Once she moved to London, she further enhanced her skills by completing an MA in Design and Textile Futures from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design. She decided to continue her journey in the dynamic field of textiles, pushing it’s  boundaries into interactive media. Her interest in exploring the relationship between places and spaces has led her to another dimension of textiles that investigates  it’s tangible and tactile nature.

 

i.Wall

i.Wall is an interactive design concept originally suggested for the Terminal 5. It appropriates the RFID tags used in electronic passports to create a cross cultural dialogue. Sabahat’s project engages itself in exploring the importance of identity and communication. It is an attempt to focus on spaces that are not used for any social interactivity and how these spaces can be transformed into places of cultural contact. i.Wall is a smart and sustainable system, smart being in it’s response to diverse nationalities and creating a delightful ambiance, sustainable in containing knowledge of various cultural crafts. This provides a sense of comfort and unity in these chaotic times of social injustices. 

www.sabahatnawaz.com 

 


 


Sandip Shah (G)

Sandip Shah PortraitSandip Shah was born 1972 in Germany. He studied at the Städel School of Fine Arts in Frankfurt. 2002 he founded in Darmstadt the b.k.i., the lived-in art installation, where he lives and organises art events since then.

In his “Project Security Office” he films publicly visitors for a longer period. Simultaneously the visitors are confronted with their vanity on monitors. With this project the artist refers to the increasing observation mania and slips into the role of the controlling government apparatus.

Antwerpen HafenFrom the authentic video control tapes Shah extracts numberless black and white video stills and makes print outs of his mostly unknown protagonists. Later he compiles them to wall covering overall pictures and thus creates a permanently moving mass of people. The “Project Security Office” was first realised in Frankfurt in 2007 and later at various places in Germany and abroad.

In his multi facetted oil on canvas paintings he gives his by digitally recorded figures a new identity beyond the photographic picture. In a tedious work process layer after layer Shah invents his figures again manually. He thus creates complementary encoded lines of force on canvas. 

www.bewohnte-kunst-installation.de

 


 

 
Ruby Sircar (Austria)


Ruby Sircar is a theorist, writer, artist, currently Research Associate at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Department for Architecture, Graz University of Technology, she was a Research Fellow at the Theory Department of the Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht and holds a PhD in Art Theory and Post-Colonial Studies. Her research covers cultural and migrational translation and difference, spatial, sonic and media architecture as knowledge production. 



 

 

 

Shihab Vaippipadath (G/India)

Shihab PortraitShihab was born 1972 in Kerala/India. He studied painting, graphic and new digital media at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. He now lives in Berlin and partly in India. Shihab paints, draws, makes designs and produces digital trick films. He exhibited in Germany and India.

A Single digital line
Digital drawing trick film, 2005

A Single digital line creates a portrait on canvas within 4 minutes with dancing and rhythmic steps of drumbeats.An absolute short film definitely exposes the development and evolution of a line.

 

Crows trap
Digital drawing trick film, 2007

The crows which are coming from somewhere outside the earth, are fascinated by the earth. The guard protects and keeps the earth. They are sitting around the earth and observing the development of it. Millions of crows are flying in the direction of earth. They build nests; they hatch eggs to bring forth a new generation. Unfortunately one of them got trapped on the earth and is trying to get out, ending up with a tormenter scream.


www.chayam.com



Texts about Vinita Agarwal, Karan Islania and Sabahat Nawaz appear by courtesy of ENTER/Waterman, London




 

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