Booth 1B01
At the long-awaited return of Art Basel’s Hong Kong edition, we are presenting artworks by leading Indian contemporary artists Anju Dodiya, Atul Dodiya, Balkrishna Doshi, Nalini Malani, N.S. Harsha, Praneet Soi, Shilpa Gupta and Sunil Gupta, in a special curation titled What Do We Do With a Love Like That?, which explores the logic of elimination as a dimension of creation in these artists’ various technical and thematic practices.
The canonization of Western logic is an imperialist inheritance within the Eastern cultural imagination, often leading to enduring negotiations between what is considered traditional and contemporary in cultural currency. The present–absence theory of existence is germane to how ideas are shaped and shared today, not only by cultures overpowered by historical undercurrents but also by individual expressors who align with oppositional shifts, either in rejection or in embrace of worlds outside their own boundaries – importantly recognizing cultures outside their own making. In this light, processes of deconstructive erasure are exercises in additive subtraction, a post-modernist impetus to reconcile difference on a spectrum as opposed to the revolutionary deletion that so characterized twentieth-century modernism.
In What Do We Do With a Love Like That? Atul Dodiya quotes Western art historical references alongside Mahatma Gandhi’s cultural heritage as the Father of the Nation in a composition replete with narrative tension; Anju Dodiya’s digital prints on painted fabric mounts hinge on the anxieties of creativity and self-hood as she conjoins personal photographs with stained, detail images of her artworks set within a light installation; Nalini Malani turns to the Western canon, including Greek mythological characters and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s two-part play Faust, to invoke the ingenuity, knowledge and prophetic qualities of the feminine psyche; N.S. Harsha invokes our relationship to cosmic myths through the representational figure of one of Lord Hanuman’s langurs, in conversation with the interminable Western trope of the Mother and Child; Praneet Soi juxtaposes cultural landscapes often of personal significance in an exploration of how images mutate and migrate across borders; Shilpa Gupta lays bare the isolations and mobility of cultural life especially during experiences of lockdown; Sunil Gupta addresses the lack of queer experience and identity in Indian art history through staged black-and-white photographs shot in New Delhi in the 1980s; and Balkrishna Doshi offers a surrealistic wall sculpture that amalgamates his childhood memories with a search for existential meaning.
To view the show virtually once the fair commences, please visit our website www.vadehraart.com. An e-catalogue, with more information on the artworks and participating artists, is also available on request. For all inquiries, please write to art@vadehraart.com.
