picks January 29, 2020

Dayanita Singh

“I think in books,” says Dayanita Singh. Early in her career, Singh would cut up her medium-format contact sheets and paste them into accordion notebooks that could be unraveled and displayed. Bookmaking, for Singh, is a way by which to understand the photographs she takes. This exhibition, “Zakir Hussain’s Maquette,” consists of a book, its spreads, and an accompanying foldout poster pinned onto the gallery walls. Specifically, what’s on display is a facsimile of a maquette Singh made as a student in 1968 titled “Zakir Hussain,” a photo-essay full of meticulously handwritten notes, measurements,

picks December 13, 2019

Atef Maatallah

Atef Maatallah chases ruins. Although his photorealist pencil-on-paper drawings take us to the Roman archaeological site of Thuburbo Majus in Tunisia, theirs is a more detached ruin lust. It’s not the crumpled architecture Maatallah is after, but what happens inside of what remains. In Les Linges de Junon (all works cited, 2018), a wrinkled plastic bag slaps against a stone archway as two dresses are strung to a Corinthian column—hung out to dry—swelling in the breeze. In Pugilats, a plastic water bottle rolls onto a mosaic of two ancient Greek boxers, joined by a squeezed plastic cup. In Le

print December 2019

Naeem Mohaiemen

Families, if you look closely enough, tell the big histories. In 2010, Naeem Mohaiemen found a small cardboard box as he cleared things from the old family home in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Inside, he discovered wrapped in wax paper more than a hundred negatives, carefully labeled in his father’s handwriting. These images became the subject of Mohaiemen’s film Rankin Street, 1953, 2013, where he shows us the photographs and provides narration. This year, he revisited these images with a suite of transfer prints, Baksho Rohoshyo (Chobi Tumi Kar?) (Mystery Box [Photo, Who Do You Love?]), 2019, made from

picks July 19, 2019

“Mutarerium”

Only what mutates can survive in curator Adwait Singh’s ecologically oriented three-person exhibition, titled after an amalgam of terrarium and mutare, the Latin word for the verb change. Priyanka D’Souza’s How to Unromanticise the Anthropocene, 2018, charts a history of industrial whaling and marine pollution across four panels delicately painted in a Deccan miniature style. Two works zoom in on the interior of a whale’s stomach permeated by a plastiglomerate—a new geological hybrid formed when plastic melts into lava, shells, coral, wood, and sand, glinting in the rock like confetti. Displayed

picks April 06, 2019

Sadik Kwaish Alfraji

In Iraqi artist Sadik Kwaish Alfraji’s five-minute animation The River That Was in the South (all works cited, 2019), things melt into each other with great speed. In one sequence, large-petaled flowers turn into smiling faces, which darken to become sleepy, blinking eyelids. Plucking a single moment from the film is like trying to hold on to running water. Nothing can be separated from what precedes or follows it. Alfraji’s understanding of time is liquid; what has happened in the past continues to bleed into the present. His preferred media-jet-black illustrations and stop-motion shorts made

picks March 13, 2019

Chennai Photo Biennale 2019

In a photograph by Aishwarya Arumbakkam on display at the Government College of Fine Arts, long, slim fingers pull shiny, wet organs over a pile of flat stones. It’s more beautiful than brutal: a tender imagining of someone grabbing at the remains of something lost. In the series “Ahp,” 2016, Arumbakkam animates an old Cambodian myth about a female ghost ostracized and feared by village life.

At the Senate House, several card cutouts of blown-up images lie staggered on a zig-zagging table in a stained-glass room, each image carefully excised from the photojournalist archive of The Hindu—a leading

diary February 11, 2019

Sharp Critique

THE MOST LAVISH PARTIES coinciding with India Art Fair are the midday brunches: As the sun pelts through the now characteristically hazardous air pollution, attendees reach for the Bloody Marys. At one such event, hosted at the home of Shalini Passi, founder of the Shalini Passi Art Foundation, banners shifted in the wind, declaring: Lunch is Cancelled. In a performance, artist Mithu Sen paraded out of the house, followed by a marching band, and servers were wearing anti-lick recovery cones for pets around their necks. Sen wore a cone with a special blond frill. Passi’s black pug, adorned with

picks December 07, 2018

Nikhil Chopra

The air is thin in Nikhil Chopra’s drawings. They take us to high altitudes: In Sundersar, 2018, we are at a lake 3,900 meters above sea level in Kashmir, where the water stretches across the scene like a transparent sheet. The “Lands, Waters & Skies” of the show’s title are smudged together in oil pastel, turpentine, and charcoal on paper. In Jadsar, 2018, Chopra chases sunlight over ragged mountains, through the center of which slips a small mercury-silver stream. A number of works in the series correspond to Chopra’s seventy-five-mile walk across Kashmir’s Liddar Valley, where he travelled

picks November 21, 2018

Sophia Brueckner and Tara Kelton

Pinkish-gold curtains open to a room in which a smiling white man sits alertly over a glass desk. A large CCTV camera points directly at him. A Corinthian column decorates one end of the room, an Ikebana arrangement the other. Glitter speckles the scene, lit by a sloping peach light. The image forms part of the series “Black Box,” 2018, for which Tara Kelton interviewed Uber drivers in Bangalore, asking them to describe “what Uber looks like.” Using their responses as visual cues, Kelton commissioned local photography studios to produce representations from their existing image banks. The kitschy

film May 02, 2018

Code Red

“YES, SHE POISONED A WHOLE TOWN, BUT . . . ,” a friend texts me after watching the recently released Netflix documentary series Wild Wild Country (2018), and it is a popular response to Ma Anand Sheela, the true heroine of the show. The six-episode film presents an extraordinary amount of footage from the four years of Rajneeshpuram, a sixty-three-thousand-acre ranch in Wasco County, Oregon, established in 1981. The five thousand people who lived at Rajneeshpuram wanted to be with their Bhagwan (the Hindi word for “God”), Rajneesh, who is better known by the name Osho. The Rajneeshees flipped

picks March 08, 2018

Jihan El-Tahri

For her first-ever solo presentation, Jihan El-Tahri examines where the histories of Egypt and India coincide, beginning with four photographs. In three, the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the second president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, walk down a gilded staircase. Appearing jovial, they whisper to each other, and in the fourth photograph—the only one publicly disseminated at the time—they shake hands, turning high-voltage smiles to the cameras, and to us. Opposite these images, which were taken in Belgrade in 1960, is a small screen showing a film from the Indonesian

picks February 09, 2018

Shreyas Karle

A fluorescent-pink hose angles up to the ceiling only to fall back to the floor, slumping into an awkward pile. This item—Frustrated gardener, 2017—is placed opposite a two-legged terra-cotta horse pressed between two sheets of museum glass. As the title explains, it is busy Performing under pressure in the museum of broken objects, 2018. Shreyas Karle’s exhibition “Unnecessary alcove” is a museological display stripped of embellishments. The titles of the works are revealing, and if you read them quickly in sequence you end up with a verse full of hot anxiety and flat aspiration: Gap by the

picks November 28, 2017

Jayashree Chakravarty

In Earth as Heaven: Under the Canopy of Love (all works cited, 2017), an installation in the rotunda of the museum’s top floor, artist Jayashree Chakravarty has visitors walk through a large, fleshy cocoon. The materials she has assembled reveal themselves along the sculpture’s interior terrain: tea and tobacco leaves, roots, stems, insects with intact wings, handmade Nepali and Chinese papers, powders of dried leaves, plastic beads, clay, and discarded scraps of cloth. Outside the cave-like sculpture, large collages of similar material line the walls, unfurling from ceiling to floor.

In Pierre

picks July 03, 2017

Praneet Soi

The latest in the museum’s series of exhibitions intended to stoke dialogue between contemporary artists and the institution’s archive begins with a large freestanding curved painting, titled Notes on Labour, 2017, installed in the foyer. The twisted figures in the composition lurch into a void. Perhaps this speaks to the show’s premise—for history to meet with the present, one must accept a certain degree of freewheeling association. The absurdity here is in the juxtaposition: The lavishly refurbished colonial interiors of the museum house Praneet Soi’s investigations into the labor processes

Skye Arundhati Thomas