MIRROR/ MAZE: Echoes of song, space, spectre

The formulation of this exhibition owes its stimulus to artists and their compelling forms of practice, initiating a re-thinking about art and its presence in our lives. Watching an artist push the limits of her body and mind to endure pain and perform her seven deaths is a telling image, perhaps of a long drawn struggle to liberate herself from the fear of mortality and the unknown. Deeper truths often lie beyond the realm of reason. Artists hold a mirror to the sensed, felt and partially known worlds.

The self-willed journeys of these artists not only highlight the meticulousness of their craft, depth of their content and enchantment with technology, but more so, their determination, focus and grit to confront the ineffable and indefinable through their practice. With a creative force oscillating between meditation and labour, stillness and action, aimlessness and purpose, they gather themselves to step out of their comfort zone, enter unfamiliar spaces and labyrinths and take us along into the deeper realms of our being. They raise difficult questions that have no easy or definite answers.

The exhibition in the form of a space-maze, takes the viewers through long corridors that lead us into dark spans and illuminated areas, into painted images and artificial hyper realities, immaterial presences and fantastical objects, evoking an impalpable sense of awe, beauty, and mystery in the ‘surreality’ of time and space.

These encounters open paths for newer understandings.

And we become much more than what we are, in that moment of realization.

Click for Free Guided Tour

Prussian Blue: A Serendipitous Colour that Altered the Trajectory of Art

Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
Curated by Dr Arshiya Lokhandwala
Preview: Monday, September 18th, 2023

Prussian Blue: A Serendipitous Colour that Altered the Trajectory of Art is a survey exhibition of nineteen artists exploring their engagement with the colour Prussian Blue. This invitation is extended to the artist to explore, investigate, and engage with the colour in their own unique and individual manner. Although Prussian Blue is widely used in the artist’s colour palette its uniqueness is relatively unknown, nor is its link between art and science that truly transformed the course of art forever.

Blue has historically always been a colour of great magnitude, symbolizing serenity, stability, inspiration, and wisdom. As a colour blue has been prominently visible since the third millennium BC in ancient Egypt produced by grinding down lapis lazuli mined from the mountains of Afghanistan, and used in jewelry, painting and on the sarcophagi. Its lengthy grinding and washing process makes the natural pigment valuable—roughly ten times more highly priced than the stone it comes from and as expensive as gold. This prohibitive pricing and shortage of the material resulted in blue becoming a color of privilege in which the preciousness of the pigment was reserved for sacred subjects, such as the robes of religious figures, depictions of the Virgin Mary and other votive images commissioned paintings for the nobility during the Renaissance. There is an interesting story that suggests that Michelangelo couldn’t afford ultramarine (another name for lapis lazuli) for his painting The Entombment, leaving it unfinished as the result of his failure to procure the prized pigment. In a similar manner as the west, ground lapis lazuli was also used to adorn the Indian miniature paintings as color held an extreme significance, both in terms of visual representation and symbolic meaning, sometimes, however making way for cheaper substitute such as indigo and azurite due to its exorbitant costs.

Hence it was by accident in a Berlin laboratory (then a center for alchemy) in 1704 that changed the course of art forever. Two German alchemists, Jacob Diesbach and Johann Konrad Dippel chemists rushed to create a batch of cochineal red (made from bugs) accidentally used potash contaminated by (the iron in) animal blood that turned the concoction a deep blue – henceforth known as Prussian blue or Berliner Blau, due to its geographic origins and because the Prussian army dyed its soldiers’ jackets with the colour.

This new blue pigment was not only affordable but also stable (colourfast) and became an instant sensation. Previously using fast fading vegetable dyes or indigo for blue, Japanese artists found the new pigment revolutionary. Japanese woodblock artist Katsushika Hokusai used it to create his iconic The Great Wave off Kanagawa, as well as other prints in his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series, in 1830, used the new Prussian blue, in combination with the traditional indigo, to great effect.

Many artists turned to Prussian blue to convey deeper emotions including Pablo Picasso whose work between 1901 and 1904 called his “Blue Period“ that Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art specialist Allegra Bettini adds ‘cast[s] a melancholy shade on his works.’ Prussian Blue revolutionized an art industry starved of a stable blue pigment to rival the prohibitively expensive ultramarine. The world’s first synthetic pigment was thus born.

The exhibition features works across a range of media, including, painting, sculpture, video, and installation art. For example, the Cyanotypes experiments Interplay # 139 by Parul Gupta, or Sea-wind of the Night 1 a painting by Anju Dodiya on fabric which draws on the Japanese woodblock artist Kats ushika Hokusai’s iconic The Great Wave off Kanagawa or the majestic painting by N S Harsha, Andhar Bahaar of an astronaut looming in deep space or Mithu Sen’s Tritanopia (blindness of Blue) that contains no blue to name a few, allow us to contemplate a deeper understanding of colour and its significance

Participating Artists:

Anita Dube, Anju Dodiya, Alke Reeh, Astha Butail, Atul Dodiya, Desmond Lazaro, Mithu Sen, N S Harsha, Sheba Chhachhi, Shilpa Gupta, Subodh Gupta, Parul Gupta, Prajakta Potnis, Ranbir Kaleka, Sumakshi Singh, Shambhavi, Thukral & Tagra , Vivan Sundaram, Waqas Khan

Visiting the exhibition

Public View: 19 September – 20 December 2023
Venue: KNMA, Noida
Address: KIRAN NADAR MUSEUM OF ART
Plot No. 3 A, Sector 126,
NOIDA, U.P.
Timing: 10:30 A.M - 6:30 P.M
The museum is closed on Monday and all public holidays
Admission to exhibitions is free

The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) is delighted to present a new group exhibition titled, Inner Life of Things: Around Anatomies and Armatures curated by Roobina Karode (Chief Curator and Director, KNMA) at the Noida space of the museum. The exhibition brings forth independent projects by 15 artists whose investigations are rooted in the ecologies of co-existence as well as the enigmatic life of objects and materials beyond and autonomous from human perception.

INNER LIFE OF THINGS: AROUND ANATOMIES AND ARMATURES

26 April 2022 to 28 December 2022

KNMA-NOIDA

The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) is delighted to present a new group exhibition titled, Inner Life of Things: Around Anatomies and Armatures curated by Roobina Karode (Chief Curator and Director, KNMA) at the Noida space of the museum. The exhibition brings forth independent projects by 15 artists whose investigations are rooted in the ecologies of co-existence as well as the enigmatic life of objects and materials beyond and autonomous from human perception. The show opens at a time when, following the COVID-19 outbreak, attempts to claim what is humane and the social appear to be the most popular and urgent questions. However, unravelling a world pre-dating or even outliving the time of humankind on earth, the exhibition proposes a radical ethic of co-existence uncorrupt by the hubris of man. It speculates a place where the animate and the inanimate communicate with each other free from our mediation and control. The works of art in the exhibition, even when they appear to be testifying to the artist’s craft and imagination, give primacy to the very inner workings of the art objects: the anatomies and armatures that give the world its shape and character.

The four-panel watercolour painting of Lahore-based artist Ali Kazim (b. 1979) is executed in subdued shades and presented on a scale that overwhelms the viewer. It is inspired by the artist’s visit to the ancient Indus Valley Civilization excavation site near the river Ravi, and the ruins of culture it preserves. In her installation and video work, Vibha Galhotra (b. 1978) weaves a visual interpretation of changing landscapes through metallic ghungroos, and presents a calming ritual with her potted sapling by redeeming it of all the burdens of the city borne dust and grit. Anindita Bhattacharya‘s (b. 1985) acutely crafted lines of lushly detailed organic clusters and foliage in earthy hues, executed in the tradition of Mughal miniature painting, prompt the viewer to find the hidden and intricate patterns in nature. The idea of traversing lesser-travelled terrains and vast expanses is explored in Shalina S Vichitra’s (b.1973) landscape with a thousand white flags, inspired by Tibetan Buddhist dictums and the spiritual harmony that they seek with respect to the primordial laws and spirits of nature. Astha Butail’s (b. 1977) take on ancient methods of archiving and the tradition of carrying oral histories through Rg Vedic myths and metaphors marks a meticulous installation with minuscule prototypes of book-like objects.

Pulling the vantage point closer as if through a magnifying glass is Nibha Sikander’s (b. 1983) hyperreal images of critters and moths. They are manifestations of the artist’s entomological interest that seeks not to dissect, but to deconstruct the received notions of natural history. Reena Saini Kallat (b. 1973) presents the phantasmagorical within the natural world through her illustrations of morphologies and mutations of living organisms, suggesting an alternative evolutionary turn that is both surreal and humorous, bizarre and premonitory. Finding the threshold between nature and civilization in the ruins of agriculture, Shambhavi Singh (b. 1966) searches for the materiality of existence beyond the confines of function and utility.

Debasish Mukherjee’s (b. 1973) work is an ode to the years from his childhood and the artisanal past. The work is poetic in its nature of folding, stacking and meticulously arranging the fabric of the white sarees from his late grandmother’s collection which now bears the insignia in the form of digital print portraits on both sides of the stack. Rajendar Tiku’s (b. 1953) small-scale works are the repository of a sense of belonging that is complicated by the melancholic ideas of homeland and the trauma of migration. In the context of the exhibition, these dwarfed chests of memorabilia appear to be the remnants of material memory and craft in the absence of their human custodians. Handling the tropes of migration and alienation is also the work by Rathin Barman (b. 1981) who investigates the intricacies of structural plans of houses that he moved from and into in order to locate the fragments of ownership and dissociation. They also give shape to the exhibition’s proposition on the inner life of things, an interior space that is made of the brute materiality of objects as well as the immaterial traces of spectral subjects. Dissecting the idea of architectural fragmentation further, Dilip Chobisa (b. 1978) rekindles the effect of assemblages neatly arranged in a grid. Often imitating structural drawings of engineers and architects, Kishor Shinde’s (b. 1958) compositions create illusions of high rises under construction, bridges dissolving in air, or mobile towers blurring away into a smoggy horizon. Exploring another dimension of grid-like overlay is seen in Rahul Kumar & Chetnaa’s (b. 1976 and 1981) collaborative work which finds resonances within urban surroundings and structures as the textured discs made in stoneware are arranged in a compact manner, contrasting with the blue and gold angular lines. Seher Shah and Randhir Singh’s (b. 1975 and 1976) cyanotype prints are careful studies of cityscapes and architectural motifs typical of the Brutalist style and the vestiges of an incomplete modernization that litter the contemporary.

Unfoldings: The Route Map of Experience, a solo by Jayashree Chakravarty is presented by Akar Prakar, India, in collaboration with Asia Week New York (online), and KNMA, as venue partner. In the words of artist Jayashree Chakravarty, “This particular work, when I see it now, after almost eighteen years, I am pleasantly surprised because of the continuous imagery that I spread out in a very painterly way. The idea I worked with, was that I wanted to paint a land that can always stand in front of me. I was immersed in the act of painting and drawing simultaneously, indulging the over-all surface and its texture, overlapping close and distant views, memories echoing words in the encircling form. In making this, I wanted to create a kind of an interior space, an evocation of a sheltering cave or a womb.

Unfoldings: The Route Map of Experience | Jayashree Chakravarty

March 11 - April 15, 2021

KNMA-NOIDA

Unfoldings: The Route Map of Experience, a solo by Jayashree Chakravarty is presented by Akar Prakar, India, in collaboration with Asia Week New York (online), and KNMA, as venue partner. In the words of artist Jayashree Chakravarty, “This particular work, when I see it now, after almost eighteen years, I am pleasantly surprised because of the continuous imagery that I spread out in a very painterly way. The idea I worked with, was that I wanted to paint a land that can always stand in front of me. I was immersed in the act of painting and drawing simultaneously, indulging the over-all surface and its texture, overlapping close and distant views, memories echoing words in the encircling form. In making this, I wanted to create a kind of an interior space, an evocation of a sheltering cave or a womb.

Roobina Karode, Director and Chief Curator of KNMA, who has previously curated the practice of Jayashree Chakravarty at the Musée des arts asiatiques, Nice, and at the Musee Guimet in Paris, writes, “Jayashree’s works are experiential - they invite touch, the immersion of the body and senses into the enveloping/unfolding monumental form. In this work done in 2002-3, she creates her handmade paper scroll stretched long to paint on an expansive continuous surface. The nearly sixty feet shape shifting wall-like structure made from the composite of different kinds of paper and fabric pieces, superimposed and glued, invites us, the viewers, into its enveloping space with an interior chamber. The work gradually reveals its various layers and overlapping imagery of the flux of life around us.”

Karode adds, “It is indeed fascinating to see her work with a mobile vantage point, animating the gestural flow of whirling spaces painted on both sides of the scroll. What is worth noting in this particular work is how she has assimilated raw textures and colours of building material - stone, brick and mortar as well as those of earth, soot, limonite and red ochre found in natural shelters.”

KNMA Chairperson Kiran Nadar says: “I really enjoy the way Jayashree responds and creates spaces in and around her work.  Her imagery is evocative and affective. It draws the viewer into her multi-layered world. One is lost in the moving and swirling of images that seem to rise and collapse in her monumental scrolls, a remarkable invention in her distinct art practice.”

The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art turns ten this year.

We celebrate the past decade, bringing back vignettes that will highlight the museum’s multi-focal vision, its evolving mission, directions and journeys undertaken, mapping intersecting histories of the subcontinent. Reflecting on KNMA’s archive and collection built over the course of ten years of institution-building exercise and exhibition-making, this 10-years-exhibition reconsiders the complexities of inhabiting semi-permanent spaces, one inside a mall and the other in a technology hub. It explores the potential of a young coming of age institution in South Asia that is continuously plotting under-researched narratives, interventions, shared and collective experiences in art

Amitava Das | Arunkumar HG| Ashim Purkayastha | Bharti Kher |C. Douglas | Debanjan Roy | GR Iranna| Gigi Scaria | Gogi Saroj Pal | Himmat Shah | Jagannath Panda | Jamini Roy | Jayashree Chakravarty | Jitish Kallat | Jyoti Bhatt | Kalighat Paintings | KG Subramanyan |KM Madhusudhanan| Karen Knorr | Leela Mukherjee | LN Tallur | Madhvi Parekh | Manisha Gera Baswani | Manjit Bawa | Manjunath Kamath | MF Husain | Mithu Sen | Prabhakar Pachpute | PS Ladi | Rabindranath Tagore| Ram Rahman | Ranbir Kaleka | Raqib Shaw| Rina Banerjee | Shibu Natesan| Sonia Khurana | Suhasini Kejriwal | Surendran Nair | Tapas Sarkar| Vasudevan Akkitham

SIGHTINGS: out of the wild, presents a selection of over one hundred and fifty artworks of forty artists from the collection of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and other collections.

Out of place, a startled (living) cheetah within a palatial interior presents conflicting narratives. Is this a forced migration, loss of natural habitat or an accidental detour? A ‘rinky-dinky’ panther in its flamboyant pink body covered with sperm-shaped bindis is ready to leap at its prey or take off to seek life elsewhere. An elephant made of burnt wood excretes silver poop in an unusual case of esophageal reflux. The rhinoceros made out of reclaimed industrial packaging wood burnt and recycled paper pulp is trying to make its way into the room. It is already half-way there. Animals bring back to memory the stuff of childhood, the beauty of their form and texture, their capability to connect and respond to love and care and the desire to draw and shape them in material.

‘Creatures of the mind and less of this world’ frolic and lurk in the dark interiors of the subconscious. A conference of birds and beasts takes place against a semi-apocalyptic, cloudy and smoke-filled sky, derelict cityscape and a facade of an ancestral house, perhaps for arduous journeys yet to be undertaken. And, there we see the cockroach, magnified and beautifully detailed, precariously occupying the edge where sanitized floor and designed buildings confront the sensual lush of nature. The homeless sparrows flutter around a barren tree, while humans occupy the expanding cityscape with more skyscrapers and apartment homes. The endangered butterflies all seek refuge in a cocoon-form, a hide away place, far from the fear of humans. A hybrid, previously non-existent creature, snarls out from depleting agrarian economy of Rajasthan. The winged creatures in the absence of god, cast a spell of doubt amidst all glitters and the column of ants relentlessly move within the anatomy of a house, drawing lines and patterns routing cracks and corners.

‘Sightings: out of the wild’ highlights an existential void and our increasingly uneasy relationship with the natural/animal world- a splintered world that seeks renewal, contact and oneness with nature. It presents fables and allegories of the animal world that appear in human-centric tales and imagination; told and reflected through playful and critical contestations staged between human and other species.

The exhibition hints at the fissures, the trauma of encroachment, human neglect, signs of extinction, resistance and the reverse gaze of the other living worlds.

Artists: ganesh pyne . meera mukherjee. somnath hore .ganesh haloi . jogen chowdhury

The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) is pleased to announce the opening of the first exhibition of 2019, over the edge, crossing the line: five artists from Bengal, at KNMA Noida on 20th January 2019. The exhibition will continue till 30 June 2019.

Continuing the extensive explorations of different art movements, regions and artistic ideologies within South Asia, this year KNMA presents in-depth oeuvres and artistic inclinations of five modern masters from Bengal: Ganesh Pyne (1937 -2013), Meera Mukherjee (1928 – 1998), Somnath Hore (1921 -2006), Ganesh Haloi (b.1936) and Jogen Chowdhury (b. 1939). Coming from various parts of Bengal, their visual vocabularies reach maturity during 1970s and 1980s, with the city of Calcutta emerging as an intersection point. The social and political changes, witnessing and observing major occurrences like the Bengal famine, the Tebhaga movement, the Bangladesh Language Movement, the Vietnam War, and avant-garde mobilization in the creative disciplines of literature, cinema and theatre, has shaped their individual artistic styles and preoccupations. The chronological radius of the exhibition spans more than five decades from 1960s to early 2000s, showcasing more than two hundred artworks from KNMA collection and loans from artists and private collections.

The exhibition pursues the intensity and the edge at which these five practices seem to be located. It tries to look through the traces of what has remained or distilled through long duree process of artistic gesticulations on canvas or paper. Delving into the empirical and the subconscious, these five modern masters have created extraordinary visuals, meticulously ossified from the worlds seen and sensed. They take viewers on a journey to the unknown, and speak of both, longing and suffering, sometimes through direct representation of the real, and at times with allegories and obscure symbols. The exhibition oscillates between scenes soaked in half-light, colour fields, unbroken lines or contours of a figure, decay and poetic distortions, as if almost hiding the corporeal body and paving paths to view the body of a landscape.

Collective anxieties and turmoil surface often in interesting ways in this selected body of work. The exhibition explores how the transfigured, charged and complex imagery challenges rigid perceptions of viewing. With approximately thirty to forty artworks of each artist, the exhibition takes one through their unique journey from different phases of aesthetic formulations: from being chroniclers, appropriating the roles of narrator, illustrator, image makers and activists to being myth-shapers. A diverse range of techniques, mediums and configurations: paintings in tempera, gouache, watercolours, mixed media, ink and pastels, woodcut, lithography, etching and paper pulp prints and sculptures casted in bronze and plaster of Paris constitute this presentation.

For instance, Ganesh Haloi’s untitled gouache works punctuated with sporadic yet minimal colour patches and hyphenated lines, transport the viewer to imaginary pasturelands. These transitory landscapes hold the memory of real pathways and evoke a sensory and spatial experience of movement. In an almost contrasting rhythm are Ganesh Pyne’s quick jottings in pen and the multi-layered tempera works like Death (1975) or The Swim which falls between the real and the mysterious. Pyne, who has always been immensely drawn to water, creates these layers of dark undercoats of paint and then applies lighter colours to create mysterious effects, invites us to take detours from the surfatial. Meera Mukherjee’s sculptural explorations of myths and decorative patterns, modelled with a certain solidity of wax, recreate her observations and learnings in bronze-casts techniques learnt from living with the craftsmen of Bastar. Her sculptures like Nagardola (Ferris wheel) or Srishti depict the cyclical rhythm of human survival.

In Jogen Chowdhury’s Gulabi Takia (1977-80) made in ink and pastel on board, or A Couple (1984) painted in ink and pastel on paper, one sees the tender or uneven contours of human figures made with intricate crosshatchings. They lack firmness as if mirroring the deformation of societal structures. Somnath Hore’s figures, studies and symbolic open wounds tend towards minimal forms. He pulls our attention to the emaciated bodies who are delicately etched between hunger and fasting. His Wounds (1973), the paper pulp prints, though echo the memories of violence in Vietnam war, are reflections on human existence and the sufferings from man-made wars and scarcities. 

OPENING PREVIEW: 20 January 2019, Sunday, 6.30 pm onwards

KNMA-NOIDA, Plot 3A, Sector 126, Noida, U.P.

Exhibition Dates: 22 January – 30 June 2019

Closed on Monday and Public Holidays, 10.30 am – 6.30 pm

NEW CONFIGURATIONS vignettes from the collection in recent years

A Ramachandran, Aisha Khalid, Akbar Padamsee, Arpana Caur, Aipita Singh, Avinash Chandra, Ayesha Sultana, Biren De, FN Souza, GR lranna, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Hema Upadhyay, Himmat Shah, Imran Qureshi, J Sultan Ali, Jagannath Panda, Jamini Roy, Jayashree Chakravarty, Jehangir Sabavala, KK Hebbar, Krishen Khanna, Laxman Pai, Mohan Samant, Meera Mukherjee, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Nalini Malani, Nilima Sheikh, Prabhakar Barwe, Pushpamala N, Ram Kumar, Reddeppa Naidu, Rekha Rodwittiya, Somnath Hore, Surendran Nair, Tyeb Mehta, V Ramesh, Zarina

This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of eminent artist Ram Kumar

Participating artists:

Anandmohan Naik, LN Tallur, College Backyard, Amitesh Grover and Arnika Ahldag, K. Ramanujam, Sanchayan Ghosh and Monogobbet Society, Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran, Pad.ma, Desire Machine Collective, Cholamandal Artists, Village, Baroda Fine Arts Fair, Weavers, Service Centre, Pablo Bartholomew, J&K Academy of Art, Culture and Languages Sarai Reader 09, CAMP, Santhal Family, Open Circle, K.G. Subramanyan, Gagan Singh, Prabhakar Barwe, Nicholas Roerich, Haku Shah, Stella Kramrisch, Rags Media Collective, R.V. Ramani, Govind Nihalani, Paribartana Mohanty, Astitva Collective, Group 1890, Mochu Bhule Bisre Kalakar Cooperative and Rajeev Sethi, Inder Salim and Shantanu Lodh, Shveta Sarda J. Swaminathan and Akhilesh, Bharat Bhawan, WALA, Ram Rahman, Richard Bartholomew, Umesh Madanahalli and CAVA students, V. Arnawaz, Jyoti Bhatt, Meera Mukherjee, Harkat Unedited, Calcutta Group, SAHMAT, Siddhartha Chatterjee, Anonymous

The main protagonist of the new exhibition ‘Hangar for the Passerby’ at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Noida is the transient figure of the Passerby. The exhibition is an assemblage of collectivities, collectives, collaborative practices, and moments of transference across generations and groups of artists practicing in India. It highlights contexts, emotional investments, challenges and schema of artistic collaborations and sociality, through juxtaposition of different models and attempts of coalescence as proposed by different artists.

At the heart of the exhibition is a souvenir shop that makes the museum a meeting ground and criss-cross of institutional histories of Bharat Bhavan, Kala Bhavan, J&K Academy of Art, Culture & Languages, Kala Bhavan and Fine Arts Faculty of Vadodara. It proposes re-visitations of certain historical moments, speculating and re-enacting spatial dynamics of collectivity. Some of the groups, collectives and contexts that will be brought into discussion are Cholamandala Artists’ village, Weavers’ Service Centre, Baroda Art Fair, Astitva Collective, Sahmat, Open Circle, CAMP, Sarai Reader 09 etc. Within this meshwork and interlacing, the exhibition also presents instances of formal and informal pedagogical exercises, workshops and participatory acts, facilitated by many artists in institutional spaces.

Participating artists

C.K. Rajan, K.M. Madhusudhanan, K.P. Krishnakumar, N.N. Rimzon, and Surendran Nair

Pondering their strong Marxist idealism, artists from the Government College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum/Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala in the late 1970s-1980s were convinced about the need for radical thinking and dissent, resisting neo-colonialism, prevalent superstitions and rituals, an obsolete education system and the commercialization of art. Their rebellious spirit of the time is revealed in the puffed rings of smoke from the burning cigarette, lost in thought portraits, reading books, dreaming utopia while participating in acts of protest. Like nocturnal birds, they sat vigilant under the starry night, watching the moon in the sky, amidst the sensual lush landscape of Kerala, where the pond and the fields and the roadside shrine remained steeped in the mystique of the place. Sketching on tissue papers, painting on cigarette packets, making collages from newspaper cutouts and magazines, these artists continued to explore the intensity of charcoal, graphite and ink, and also the accessibility of prints. Inspired by literature, cinema and theatre, they shared stories, the recurrence of poetic symbols and world-histories, techniques and tools while seeking a range of expressive and aesthetic possibilities, each one alone, yet together. We see the absurdities of humanity unleashed in the black and white film-like stills in charcoal by Madhusudhanan, the dark, tragic soul of Krishnakumar’s heroic man, the subaltern figure of N.N. Rimzon amidst confining circumambulating boundaries, the political wit and satire of C.K. Rajan’s collages and the quirky whimsicality of Surendran Nair’s, sharpened through the witty play of words and images. Their growing camaraderie is witnessed in the portraits painted of each other and the spaces they occupied in the absence of individual artist-studios and financial support. The exhibition brings into focus the works of five artists who spent their formative years in Kerala and whose subversive art practice problematised the discourse of Indian Art in the 1980s and 90s.