CONTEMPLATIONS UPON TIME
AND SPACE THROUGH
ART

CONTEMPLATIONS UPON TIME AND SPACE THROUGH ART

Take a ‘walk’ around the curated space of the Abu Dhabi Art Fair using the cursor instead of your legs

Traveling to an art fair seems a bit of a distant dream in our COVID driven times. While there was a distinct sense of hope in the autumn months, winter has brought the harsh reality that this is a difficult time to expect the physicality of art to delight us, especially for those suffering from any respiratory and heart related ailments to be traveling or venturing out.

As a result, most art viewing folks have poured themselves a glass of wine and they’ve drawn up their chairs to their computers with the regularity of meeting with friends. This season is not just about the festivities but also about picking up some stimulating artwork.

An interactive digital edition of Abu Dhabi Art brings together galleries and artists from across the world in a number of curated gallery exhibitions and sectors. In this edition of Abu Dhabi Art, we look at the curated exhibitions of a few of the Indian Galleries and what they have to offer, in the online space.

One can actually visit a virtual booth and the software allows one to zoom up to paintings and ‘walk’ around the curated space using the cursor.

In the exhibition ‘Memoirs – from time and space’, Exhibit 320 brings together three artists who use encounters with time as points of departure to create occurrences through the landscapes of memory. Raw and fragile, the stories that come together are new perspectives of the mind’s eye waiting to be taken forward as discoveries from a private world into a shared one.

The artist Sumakshi Singh, Saad Qureshi, and Riddhi Shah bring their contemplations up on the aspects of time and space. Singh with her delicate thread drawings creates an inner world that speaks of the passage of time through organic forms and the natural cycle of birth, blossoming and finally wilting. Quershi’s Blue Hour, executed in acrylic paint, ink and wax pencil brings the dark mood of the nocturne to the shadowy surface. While Shah renders the notion of time through the prism of geometric shapes and patterns.

The artist Sumakshi Singh, Saad Qureshi, and Riddhi Shah bring their contemplations up on the aspects of time and space. Singh with her delicate thread drawings creates an inner world that speaks of the passage of time through organic forms and the natural cycle of birth, blossoming and finally wilting. Quershi’s Blue Hour, executed in acrylic paint, ink and wax pencil brings the dark mood of the nocturne to the shadowy surface. While Shah renders the notion of time through the prism of geometric shapes and patterns.

At Gallery Threshold’s online booth it is an exhibition titled Landscape of Memory featuring artists Anindita Bhattacharya, Pandit Khairnar and Shaurya Kumar. The exhibition looks at the idea of the imaginative configurations of sensorial memory of cultural landscapes. It strives to transform loss into gain, sorrow into consolation and the past into redemptive visions of the present and future.

Gallery 1X1 presents a group show of works by Chittrovanu Mazumdar, Ghulam Mohammed, Madhusudhanan, Rina Banerjee, Salima Hashmi and Wardha Shabbir. Dramatic plays of light and heightened colour values are visual hallmarks of Mazumdar’s sophisticated oeuvre. His imagery emerges out of daily discoveries: a word, a glance, the heartrending/blood-chilling phrase, a fleeting mise-en-scène…the rise and crest of body parts imprisoned in a tight freeze-frame. Shabbir’s laborious rendering of countless dots coming together as units to form an idea(s) on the surface is based on the “Nuqta/Dot” symbolizing infinity and life in her work. Ghulam Mohammed places his work at the intersection of the range and limitations of language, both as a visual, formal construct as well as a conveyor of meaning.

At Gallery Espace, the prevailing theme was under the title ‘Inscriptions in Space & Time’ which presented a selection of recent works by the six artists. In a variety of different mediums and artistic idioms, they evoke an alternate, imagined landscape drawn from reality, coloured by perception and memory. The exhibition features the works of artists Karl Antao, G. R. Iranna, Mekhala Bahl, Puneet Kaushik, Shambhavi, Waswo X. Waswo and R. Vijay. While Iranna presents an outlandish allegorical land where monks make music under lush canopies, Karl Antao’s finely carved teakwood torsos are an admixture of the playful and the subconscious. Mekhala Bahl’s engagement, in contrast, is with the external world, but it’s the psychological and emotive states that lie beneath that she uncovers with her complex layering and mark-making. Puneet Kaushik uses Shambhavi’s works are lit by the effulgent glow of childhood memories -craft forms, especially little-practised ones like Tibetan bead-work and tufting, to conjure up abstract, while Waswo X. Waswo & R. Vijay’s detailed works mimic the idealised landscape of Indian miniatures. However, the modern ‘white’ ‘Fedora man’ present in most of them complicates the narrative, introducing ideas and attitudes more in keeping with current times and debates.

At a combined booth of Agial Art Gallery and Saleh Barakat Gallery, we are presented with a showcase of the recent works by artists Nabil Nahas, Samir Sayegh, Ana’s Albrache, Tagreed Darghouth, Anchar Basbous, Serwan Baran and Mohammed Rawas. The overall sensibility one comes away with upon viewing the intricate and skilfully executed works is that there is beauty and death in our parallel existence, mortality and hope, and fortitude yet vulnerability lurking in our current times.

At Afriart Gallery founded by Daudi Karungi, we get to view art by young African artists who address the challenges faced by them to create work that fosters a sense of equality and a fair-playing field for those struggling for years under racial and gender-based oppression. The artists featured are Abushariaa Ahmed and Richard Atugonza. Ahmed’s work is influenced by the contemporary Sudanese art scene where he focuses on the role of women in the Sudan revolution, with their peaceful protests and sit-ins despite being violently tear-gassed. Atugonza’s current body of work encompasses a selection of portraits of the everyday people in his life, but he brings to the very personal portraits an air of the universal.

Galleria Continua had dedicated its space to Anish Kapoor displaying a work from his Black Mist series, featuring works created in Gold Verso, stainless steel and lacquer. The sublime reflective work takes off from his preoccupation with geometric forms.

Log on to check out the exhibitions in view: www.abudhabiart.ae/en