Vadehra Art Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in the second edition of SOUTH SOUTH VEZA, launched on 31 March and running until 10 April 2022.
With this edition’s focus on new media, this year’s VEZA is focused on incorporating film, video and digital works by artists from the global south and its diaspora. The event is powered by Niio and for the first time, leading contemporary galleries are coming together to harness the power of blockchain technology to support the sales of new media. Niio is a curated platform for the streaming, acquisition, collection management, preservation and sharing of video art. In addition, these works will be on view in a physical showcase at the upcoming edition of SP–Arte – the leading international art fair in São Paulo, from 6–10 April 2022. Moreover, the VEZA New Media Fund was conceived to support artists from the global south and its diaspora and will enable ambitious acquisitions of new media.
Our presentation at VEZA includes a visceral video work by Atul Bhalla titled Rupture, in which the artist attempts to conceptualize the interplay between memory, post-memory and truth around the Freedom Struggle in India, the Partition of the country and subsequent events in Punjab, poetically addressing the politics of water-sharing and borders. Our online viewing room further hosts a suite of diasec-mounted photographs by Atul Bhalla, exploring the alterity in landscapes rendered imbalanced by human intervention, as well as intricate wall sculptures by artist Gigi Scaria, also exploring environmental concerns through ideas of social and cultural (anti-)progress in urbanized surroundings.
South South’s curated programme titled Bending the Axis features the powerful work There Is No Border Here… by artist Shilpa Gupta, in which she makes an abstract political reality a personal experience, taking the flag, a dichotomy of inclusion and exclusion, and poetically presenting it as a futile attempt to divide territories.