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PRAF presents: Seeds are being Sown

September 11, 2020 - October 24, 2020

Amitesh Grover, Anna Ehrenstein, Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai, Aqui Thami, Baaraan Ijlal, Falani, Khushbu Patel, N*A*I*L*S hacks facts fictions, Parmita Mukherjee, Pêdra Costa, Rupali Patil, Tehmeena Firdos; with texts by Sabika Abbas Naqvi, Sabina Yasmin Rahman; Curated by Art Scribes Awardee Shaunak Mahbubani

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The specters of polymorphous waves of colonisation, spread over three millennia, still haunt the corporeal and emotional landscape of our world today. As the colonial project continues to veer its head through neo-liberalism and sectarian politics, the scars of violence and repression get passed down family trees. All four of my grandparents were forced to flee their homes in Sindh, travelling by sea to Bombay during the partition of the sub-continent. They spent their formative years struggling to find livelihood and belonging in resettlement camps outside the city, finding scant time for healing amongst the pressures of survival. The traumas of their loss, robbed of complexity, have been passed down to us over the generations in remarks and family whispers. These colonial fault lines, further entrenched by opportunist political actors, have hardened into the walls that help build upper-caste majoritarianism today.

Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe theorises the global move towards hardening of cultural divisions through processes of “emptying vessels,” “drilling,” and “expelling organic matter,” writing, “the erection of the vertical in a privileged position is one of the concrete traces of brutalism, whether it is exercised on bodies or on materials.” (1) This process of depletion, accelerated in this pandemic, creates isolation; one that might allow for a rational understanding of otherness, but leaves little room for a corporeal breakdown of its affect. How, then, do we create experiences of deep syncretism? Perhaps we can look to the ‘in-between’ (2) space, built on the articulation of cultural differences that act as “necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic” (3). Amongst communal acts of eating, praying, sharing fears, and dreaming equitable futures, I have experienced glimpses of what healing looks like. It is within these historically contoured terrains, drawn between body and belonging, faith and free-will, that this exhibition is seeded.

(1) Achille Mbembe, “Brutalisme” [Paris, 2020], pp. 9, 10, 11 (2) Homi K. Bhabha, “The Location Of Culture” [London : Routledge, 1994] (3) Audrey Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. [Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007], pp, 110- 114

Lots of gratitude to Vidisha Saini, Sharmila Samant, Zasha Colah, Team abr, Anushka Rajendran, Angela Anderson Guerrero, Sijya Gupta, Asma Bi, along with the teams at Prameya Art Foundation, Institut Francais en Inde, and La Napoule Art Foundation.

Shaunak Mahbubani (they/them) is the winner of Pramya Art Foundation’s Art Scribes Award 2018-19. They are a curator and arts organizer, currently living in New Delhi. They primarily pursue projects under the series ‘Allies for the Uncertain Futures’ initiated in 2016. This exhibition series is focused on exploring the possibilities of socio-political, ecological and techno-evolutionary futures through the lens of non-duality. They are interested in complicating boundaries between artwork and the viewer through participatory gatherings, diffusions, and the use of non-white cube spaces. Mahbubani has recently curated a solo exhibition of Seema Kohli’s works at Sundar Nursery (2019). They have received exhibition grants from apexart (New York) and the Inlaks Foundation, and were also a part of the inaugural 2017 edition of CISA (Curatorial Intensive South Asia) initiated by Khoj International Artist’s Association and Goethe Institut Delhi. They have previously curated exhibitions and projects at TIER (Berlin); Embassy of Switzerland, Sunder Nursery, Goethe Institut, Kalakar Theatre (New Delhi); Mumbai Art Room (Mumbai); 1Shanthi Road (Bangalore); and TIFA Working Studios (Pune). They also make spatial interventions and new media work under the moniker ‘After Party Collective’ with Vidisha Fadescha, including ‘Queer Futures Potluck Party’ as part of Five Million Incidents (2019). Mahbubani was Curator, Programming at The Gujral Foundation 2017-18, and is Inlaks-ISCP NY Curatorial Resident 2020-21.

25% of the proceeds of sales from this show will be donated to the NGO, Project Rebuilding Livelihoods to support families of the victims of violence at North-East Delhi

Amitesh Grover (b.1980) is a performance-based artist in New Delhi, India. His works move beyond theatre, into visual arts, films, photography, installations, and processes. He performs, directs, writes, curates, and keeps his practice firmly anchored in the politics of performance. His works point towards ephemeral grounds of knowledge like grief, sleep, care, and work. Through his practice, he explores proximity – the conditions of being close/nearby – as a radical form of performance. He often invites his viewers to participate in his work and respond to a set of philosophical and artistic provocations. His works are shown internationally in theatres, galleries, public spaces, and on the internet. He is the recipient of several awards including MASH FICA New Media Artist award, FORECAST Emerging Artist (HKW Germany), Arte Laguna Prize nomination (Italy), Bismillah Khan National award (India) among others. He has been on numerous international artist-residencies and has spoken about his work on prominent global platforms. He writes prolifically, works in a hybrid environment, and teaches at various art universities.

Anna Ehrenstein was born in Germany to Albanian parents and works in transdisciplinary artistic practice. While her mother could access a residency permit through a work visa, her father left Germany after denied asylum and started anew in Tirana. This biographical peculiarity aroused her interest in the necropolitics of migration.
Main foci of her work are reflections on the visual and material culture of the periphery, networked images, ecologies and precarious assemblages .She studied photography and media art in Germany and attended curatorial classes in Valetta, ML and Lagos, NG. Her work as an art un-educator is part of her collaborative practice. The materialization of intangible data, constructions around authenticity as currency, “high” and “low” cultures and reflections on knowledge circulation are as much a part of her process as texts and written word. She writes for magazines like Arts of the Working Class or Art leaks and works with a large number of groups on joint artistic projects, including for the 10th Berlin Biennale, as part of the queer feminist collective N * A * I * L * S or for the Critical Academy in Dublin. She exhibited internationally and is currently working on her second monograph and an upcoming exhibition at C/O Berlin.

Aqui Thami came to art to find healing and in her practice she is drawn to the ways art serves as processes of intercultural mediation. She works with experiences of marginalisation and resilience, her own and the people she work in collaboration with. With an ethic of social engagement and inviting viewers to inhabit and activate her works she explores and find healing in community.

DIY (Do It Yourself), DIT (Do It Together), and sometimes DDI (Don’t Do It) are the principles as well as primary mediums of her practice. They provide for merging of her life and her art offering an active engagement in both the public and the personal. Centered around the culture of self-publishing and guerrilla poster she believe in creating art that is grounded in the act of ‘doing’ and addresses political/social issues.
The versatility of the language of the mediums she works with also allows her to bring all the layers of her experiences together. Colonialism, plantation slavery, poverty, armed violence, cultural genocide, the list goes on. It is through confronting these complexities of her identity she have been able to find healing and peace through Vulnerability.
In her works, she seek to create spaces for dialogue, unlearning, disruption… anything that would make one see and experience the world differently even if it is for a fraction of a second.

Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai has graduated with a Bachelors of Fine Arts (2011) from Aligarh Muslim University and later pursued a Masters in Fine Arts from Jamia Millia Islamia (2013). Working with a range of mediums including painting, printmaking and embroidery on textiles, Ahmadzai’s artistic practice is centered around women and issues concerning them, be it their sexuality or their space in both their domestic and their community. Her knowledge of Urdu, Persian and Arabic allows her to understand the nuances of language, which find their way into her work.

Her works are mostly autobiographical and stem from her personal experiences of looking at marginalized communities around her. She is the recipient of the INLAKS Fine Art Award in 2019, which culminated with a two-month residency and a solo presentation at 1 Shanthi Road, Bangalore (2019). She has participated in ‘Out of your shadow’, a group show of six women artists from the Indian sub-continent at Gallery Espace, New Delhi (2019-20) as well exhibited at The India Art Fair (2019 & 2020) and the Delhi Contemporary Art Week (2019). Much more recently, she has just concluded a residency at The Piramal Arts Foundation, Mumbai and working on 5 million Incidents project offered by Goethe Institute, Max Muller Bhavan, Delhi.

Baaraan Ijlal, a self-taught artist based in Delhi (India) has been interested in exploring anonymity in her practice as essential to individual liberty. She seeks to enable listening and creating witnesses to unacknowledged stories. She creates work through direct interaction with individuals and communities. Her themes include evolution, migration, body, memory and alienation. She paints and creates installations of sound, video, light and embroidery.

Her sound installation Change Room, is an ongoing project to enable radical listening of unacknowledged stories, told anonymously towards possible change. Those who have recorded their stories with the artist present as a witness include nomads, people turned out of homes and neighborhoods because of their sexual orientation, victims of violence and war refugees to name a few. This project now includes a growing archive of over 1000 testimonies.

Falani, is an anonymous graffiti artist based in Kabul. Falani is very famous slang in urdu and persian used for any random woman. Since 2017, Dressed in a traditional Chador (Burqa), Falani has been painting graffiti on the walls across Kabul. She paints all Persian alphabets with visual imagery from Alif(first Persian alphabet) to Ye(last alphabet). Since 3 decades Afghanistan is struggling with security issues and artists have also been under strict scrutiny, and many practices are now inactive due to religious terrorism and orthodoxy. Falani’s intention behind this is to provide art with a voice that extends beyond the walls of a room and into the streets for popular consumption.

Khushbu Patel is an Indian Artist. Her interdisciplinary art practice spans diverse mediums in various scales presented in form of installations (site specific/site responding), photography, performative photography, videos, drawings and performance. Her interest revolves around the concept and idea of change, which she has tried to show through process, subjects, concepts and her choice of medium. Her process has always been bound up in time. The time duration from beginning a piece of work till the end, is what really holds the importance in her work, and brings us much closer to it. Things that arouse her interest have to do with the life of any living or inanimate object, the temporal quality of earthly existence and the inevitability of change and decomposition, the effect of time, its various marks, these are the prime sources of fascination in her work.
She is currently based and practicing in Vadodara, She did her graduation from Surat school of fine arts, Surat in 2015 and post graduation in Art, Design and Performing Arts from Shiv Nadar University, Delhi in 2017

Parmita Mukherjee was born in 1996, and grew up shuffling between the cities of Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai. She graduated from Srishti School of Art in Bengaluru in 2019. In 2017 she became part of a travelling arts project by Anish Victor and Maraa collective, called U/R Unreserved, where she developed a practice of using drawing and theatre as a means of observation and self-reflection. She continues to nurse a deep interest in the performance arts, and a practice of music-making and drawing. She is currently living in Bengaluru.

Pêdra Costa is a ground breaking, formative Brazilian, urban anthropologist and performer based in Berlin that utilizes intimacy to connect with collectivity. They work with their body to create fragmented epistemologies of queer communities within ongoing colonial legacies. Their work aims to decode violence and transform failure whilst tapping into the powers of resilient knowledge from a plethora of subversive ancestralities that have been integral anti-colonial and necropolitical survival.
Some exhibitions include Manifestos for Queer Futures – HAU, Berlin 2019; Living in Foul, Hessel Museum of Art, New York 2019; DICE Conference + Festival, Berlin 2018; Matadero Madrid 2018; Multitud Marica: Activaciones de archivos sexo-disidentes en América Latina, Santiago de Chile 2017 (Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende); QUEER ENCOUNTERS_VIENNA TRANS LA, Los Angeles 2017 (CalArts School of Art); WELT KOMPAKT?, Vienna 2017 (frei_raum Q21, MuseumsQuartier); Millionaires Can Be Trans // You Are So Brave, Berlin 2015 (Schwules Museum); Oral Museum of the Revolution, Barcelona 2013 (MACBA); Caos e Efeito, São Paulo 2011 (Itaú Cultural).

Rupali Patil’s visual arts practice crossfades within graphics, artistic objects, and installations. Her subjects mainly focus on social issues, especially- the subject of water and natural mineral crises. In some of her work, which relates to Term “Ecofeminism” she also depicts the impact of the industrialization on gender. Workers who became visual metaphors in her drawings inhabit an imaginary, geographically unspecified world of Patil. She also uses cartography and heterotopic landscapes, architecture in her drawing, which looks dangerously complete devoid of human existence. She has done her Bachelors in Fine Arts, from The Bharti Vidyapeeth Pune2007 and masters in Printmaking from Maharaja Sayaijaro University of Baroda (2011).
Her works were presented at exhibitions such as Eros (Parasite, University Museum and Art Gallery, Hong Kong, 2014), Insert curated by RAQS media collective (IGNCA Delhi), Kamarado (Stedelijk The museum, Amsterdam, 2015), the Saltwater theory of thought-form (14th Istanbul Biennale 2015) and ‘Harbinger of Chaos’ (Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary art in Krakow 2016-17), Habit cohabit (Pune Biennale2017) This Rare Earth Artefact ( STUK Leuven 2018). Also in 2014, Clark House Initiative in Mumbai hosted her Solo the exhibition ‘Everybody Drinks but Nobody Cries’. She lives and works in Pune.

Tehmeena Firdos graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU of Baroda with a Master’s Degree in Painting, and she currently lives and works in Delhi. Tehmeena’s works look at popular imagery pulled out of context, and appropriated to create seemingly surreal narratives. However, what visuals are seen on the surface belies the complex associations that run beneath it. Tehmeena looks at how we understand and interpret what we see and what we are subjected to. She uses various mediums and methods to execute her works, from drawing and painting, to video and kinetic sculpture.
Tehmeena has been a part of several workshops and residencies and has previously shown at FICA – The Moving Image: exploring light, movement & narrative (2017), Khoj Peers Share (2016), and most recently at UTSHA Artist Residency, Bhuvaneswar.
“Of late, I have been painting, recording sounds and making videos which bespeaks my journey through problems. But when I started articulating these problems, the problems started reflecting back- people have already been facing it. These become popular problems. My works which incorporate text and space, also enhance the idea of local and popular cultures- of landscapes and personal reactions of individuals. Focusing on current situations of an active and responsible generation”

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