What : Art After Hours with Wine and Cheese
Where : the Gallery at D-53, Defence Colony, New Delhi
When : Saturday, 25 May 2019 from 7:00 p.m
On behalf of the Oxford and Cambridge Society of India, The Secretary , Oxford and Cambridge Society of India (OCSI) has the pleasure to forward an invitation on behalf of Vadehra Art Gallery and Shaleen Wadhwana to a wine-and-cheese Art After Hours evening at 7pm on Saturday 25 May 2019 at the Gallery at D-53, Defence Colony, New Delhi.The event is a curated walk through of “Outside In” especially designed and led by Shaleen Wadhwana. “Outside In” is an exhibition of portraits.
If you would like to register for this event, please click here and complete the form.
The art of portraiture has been one of the most enduring, complex and evolving discourses on human nature. Historically portraits have memorialised the privileged and the powerful, impacting history in profound ways whose effects are still felt. Today this bastion of representation comes under systemic attack by artists who speak from subaltern, feminist, queer, non-western spaces, who have subverted this genre to speak of the unrepresented and unheard, the silent majority who have been consistently written out of history. Portraiture is now no longer a singular encounter with the subject, but it transforms into a narrative of our times that is being told through the individuals who are chosen to speak about the now.
To the artists in this exhibition the idea of a portrait is fluid, extending from within themselves – around questions of identity, existentialism, trauma and belonging – to the outside – about collectives and communities, and their right to agency and representation. To some of them making portraits is inevitably a dialogue with history, as they deconstruct the genre through insertion of autobiographical anecdotes that counter the primacy of the author. To some others the genre’s potential as historical document offers great subversive potential, allowing them to create portraits of ordinary men and women – their labour, their reality and their aspirations. Self-portraits simultaneously reveal and hide the complexity of individual identity, and dislocate the self from within the corporal and into the societal. The act of making portraits is not only a celebration of the human form and the ability to capture the inner lives of the subjects, but an acknowledgement of the fragility of the body and its inevitable mortality.
Artists in this exhibition include Dhruvi Acharya, Atul Dodiya, Suhasini Kejriwal, Riyas Komu, KM Madhusudhanan, Gieve Patel, Sudhir Patwardhan, Varunika Saraf, Mithu Sen, and Thukral & Tagra.
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