Art and Soul of the City

With the premise of how festivals and culture keeps a society alive, the panel was mediated by Sadhana Rao. Sadhana is a research-led writer and curator in the Arts & Culture area. She has written on Travel, Socio-Economics, Literature, Film festivals & Music for leading newspapers and Journals such as The Hindu, The Economic Times, Deccan Chronicle, Tehelka, Housecalls, Shruti etc. The panelists included Jagadish Raja, Kamini Sawhney, Lucy Nelson, and Namita Devidayal. Jagdish Raja and his wife, Arundhati Raja are the founders of JAGRITI. Jagdish started his working life as an apprentice printer in London. He is a Graduate Member of the Communication Advertising and Marketing (CAM) Education Foundation, United Kingdom and an Associate of the Trinity College London (ATCL). Kamini Sawhney has recently joined the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP) in Bangalore as its Director. MAP is an upcoming museum that is set to open its door to the public in the latter half of 2020. Designed as a 44,000 square foot facility in the heart of the city, it will be spread across five floors and will house multiple galleries, an auditorium, a research library, a conservation lab, classrooms, a museum store and cafe. Lucy Nelson, is the Artistic Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival in Australia, previously, co-founder and Artistic Director of Noted Writers Festival. Lucy has written non-fiction for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Big Issue and her fiction has been awarded residencies and shortlisted for prizes in Australia and the UK. Namita Devidayal is the author of The Music Room, Aftertaste and The Sixth String of Vilayat Khan. She is a journalist with The Time of India and co-director of the Times Litfest in Mumbai. She is a trained classical singer. She graduated from Princeton University.

 

The discussion revolved around the aspects of art in a society and how culture impact brings the variations in the festivals and art forms celebrated. Jagdish touched based on his journey of creation of JAGRITI. He also relates to the fact that the perception of theatre has changed over time. And, every day brings more fractions of audience is getting attracted to theatre. Engaging audience was the next segment of discussion. Kamini mentioned that with taking art to the society, we should also try to bring the society to the heart of the art. Namita added that inculcating spaces for artists other than the work projected also plays a core role in bringing art and community together. Lucy spoke how artists from varied backgrounds should be approached and their perspective on developing more inclusive spaces for people of color and differently abled must be inculcated in our present art space. 

 

Discussion on how patronage can be an issue to build such inclusive spaces was also carried forth. Kamini gave statistics on how much government funding and corporate CSR actually goes to museums. The discussion wrapped up with the questions taken from audience and final insights on the efforts of creative industry making its next best moves.  

 

 

 

About the Author: A modest graphic designer and an amateur blogger – Liyana believes in weaving stories that come as a ‘solace on a late winter night’. She loves climbing mountains and can be seen spending hours looking at the night sky. She blogs at liyanashirin. She currently writes for TheSeer.

Body Sutra

The event commenced on time at the Red Couch venue with an introductory address by Lucy Nelson followed by an extensive talk by Dr. Alka Pande (famous Indian academic and museum curator). Dr. Pande spoke about her literary safari over the years absorbing the need to explore deeper into Indian history of aesthetics with respect to the depiction of bodies to represent different cultures in the country, instead of tailing behind the western vestiges. Alka elaborated on her use of ekphrasis to cover the historical journey of sensuality in female bodies and their portrayal in Indian art. She talked about her latest book “Body Sutra” which traces the human form through art and imagination.

 

The famous curator spent 5 years of her life culminating the arguments for this vivid and enthralling expedition about Indian aesthetics of sensuality and form. In the most subtle manner possible she covers the chronological development of ekphrasis in the country. She rendered her perspective on the gender-fluid contemporary India and also enlightened the audience about various cultures, time period, and their approach towards the sensuality of the human body. She looked upon the framework that works behind the pre-modern body, medieval body, modern body as well as the contemporary body. Alka then emitted her expertise about various vestiges of Indian culture and dynamic approaches to a women’s body. She enlightened Lucy about the contradictory muses between western verisimilitudes and Indian version of sensuality which mainly deals with Shringar and Vilas. According to Alka, the concepts of body sutra are mainly inspired by ancient Rasa theories and Natya Shastras. In her book, she mentions about a lot of historical sculptures and monuments which depict the sensuous body of goddesses as well as other women. Her understanding of symbolism in Indian art is beautiful as she goes on to explain the Indian body where she talks about imagery portraying them with pendulous breasts, extremely cervical hips, curled flicks and Mukulas which are eyes formed in the shape of a lotus. This extremely alluring mannerism of women portrayal can be witnessed in a lot of Indian historical venues like Ajanta Caves and Khajuraho group of monuments. The nakedness portrayed in these sculptures refers to the spiritual element of society much more than the commodification aspect. She used a lot of mythological analogy to draw home her point regarding body sensuality. She talked about Arthanareshwar who symbolizes the body of Shiv Shakti, philosophies of Buddha and different portrayals of goddess Kali who is one of the fiercest goddesses in Indian mythology.

 

Dr. Alka explained the aesthetics of the human body and form with respect to her latest book “Body Sutra” in the most subtle manner possible, covering the details of the human body from wide-hipped, voluptuous woman that is Yakshi to her cover for the book which represents a sculpture of goddess Parvati (currently in Los Angeles county museum). This session provided extensive insight into the dynamics of body depictions and portrayals of the human form as a whole, led by the genius of Dr. Alka which paved a new platform for understanding of self and identity in respect to Indian culture.

 

 

 

About the Author: Abhinav Kumar is an MA in English with Communication Studies student from CHRIST ( Deemed To Be University), Bengaluru who believes in “No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world”. He is interested in sports journalism and travelogue writing. He currently writes for TheSeer.