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Review

A Changing World

Arpita Singh’s canvases in her solo exhibition Meeting at Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi were awash in shades of blue. In several of her paintings on display, it appeared as if tides carrying flotsam and jetsam had swept over them, generating surfaces swimming with detail. Nowhere was this more evident than in the poignantly titled The swans did not come back this year. Irregular patches of white, oddly reminiscent of corrugated roofs of shanty houses, peppered the waterscape as did a few stretches of brown and lettering in differing colours and sizes. If in the past Singh inserted flora or custard apples to fill in empty spaces in the pictorial plane, then here her flower fetish was strangely absent.

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Review

Nasreen Mohamedi: Singularity and Sociability

Nasreen Mohamedi’s hand-written letter to her close friend, artist Nilima Sheikh exudes a sense of both restraint and tenderness. With her formal handwriting, she composes what appears as a verse of concrete poetry – simultaneously referencing and exploring ideas of space – on a piece of graph paper. Providing a window into the late Modernist’s preoccupations with nature, abstraction, and the limits of perception, this letter, describing the seashore at Kihim, also inspires the title of her latest retrospective at Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation (JNAF) – Nasreen Mohamedi: The Vastness, Again and Again.

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Review

Weaving a World: Kanishka Raja’s Ground Control

Bright as a computer game on a screen, Ground Control began with references to music, borrowing its title from David Bowie, and has an aerial perspective, if not the tin-can view. Is the artist Ground Control and who is Major Tom? The roles reverse playfully, and the show, like a game, moves effortlessly between footprints of buildings, courts and playing fields, and outlines of urban spaces. The vibrant several shades of colour — earthy oranges and reds, purples, greens, blues — are interspersed with bold white lines, which resemble chalk or markers on a field.

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International Reviews

Imprinting Nature: Simryn Gill’s Naga Doodles

In the display case next to the skin is a nature-printed image made in Madras in 1857 by Henry Smith. Unlike Gill’s snakes, Smith’s specimen was artfully laid out in an elegant sinuosity, its two surfaces inked to yield a mirror-image pair when passed through a printing press. There is a history behind the contemporary work. Smith was a government printer, who claimed originality to his method of nature-printing (a process that has always been somewhat experimental), but one that was taken up by Hugh Cleghorn who in South India made many simple black prints of plant and tree parts as part of the earliest phase of the conversion of tropical forests into plantations: in his case for coffee and cinchona.

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Review

The Street and the Gallery: Shahidul Alam’s Archives of Practices

In bearing witness to the historical and the everyday, Alam continuously blurs the boundaries between the aesthetic, the political and the personal. Simultaneously, the retrospective showcased Alam’s critique of the Global South’s erasure from the history of photography and how his prominent presence in the “West” is a corrective towards decolonizing photography.

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Review

Between Warp and Weft: On Kallol Datta’s Textile Objects

Datta’s objects carry secrets around knots and folds at the kernel, and point to his practice of cutting patterns in a circular fashion at the formative stage. The circular pattern-cutting registers as an attempt to eliminate the possibility of waste, where the leftover fabric is turned into appendages for the installations.

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Current Issue

current-issue

South Asia

“The 30th issue of TAKE South Asia delves into the multifaceted processes of construction and deconstruction about the region, only to investigate the motivations behind these actions undertaken by the political agents through the lens of visual arts. The writers seek to and make an attempt to answer the questions raised regarding what constitutes ‘South Asia’, beyond its popular substitute i.e., Indian Subcontinent. In other words, the writings explore the novelty of (re)imagining the region as a shared cultural space and uncovering the underlying stakes and ideologies fuelling such constructions. This investigation is inclusive of the diverse meanings of regionalism, including sentiments of belonging expressed through art practices and efforts to establish socio- cultural institutions for nation-state collaboration.” -An excerpt from Editorial Note, Bhavna Kakar, Editor-in-Chief, TAKE on Art “The TAKE South Asia issue began with a recognition of the robust work that has been carried out by scholars, teachers, artists, curators, writers and organisations over several decades, reflecting on and complicating what ‘South Asia’ signifies. We invited several of those voices to respond to a set of questions we sent out, with the flexibility that they could pick any one or more. These questions served as the provocations for what we anticipated would lead to a stimulating exercise of reflections and propositions. Over the past months, we received an array of responses, both from within the subcontinent and several from diasporic positions. All of these are telling of the different political and art historical urgencies being felt across distant vantage points. We also received a series of artist interventions that are presented here, since art remains a vehicle and site for the sayable, the unsayable, and what will one day be said. Ishara Art Foundation expresses its heartfelt gratitude to everyone who so generously contributed to the magazine with their incisive reflections and fearless thought.” An excerpt from The Many ‘South Asia’s Sabih Ahmed, Director, Ishara Art Foundation

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Inside South Asia

‘What is South Asia Today’

Pedagogical Networks in South Asia

Connecting South Asian Modernities

South Asia, and the Possibility of Co-habitation

South Asia as Affiliation and Aspiration

Stephanie Rosenthal and Shabbir Hussain Mustafa in Conversation Akin to the Mangrove

‘South Asia’: Definitional Impossibilities and Potentialities

‘South Asia’ and Pop Art

In Defense of Illegibility

What ‘South Asia’ Signifies Today

Resistance and Solidarity: S(h)ifting Through Political Ripples of South Asia

Pathways of Affinities

Art and Power: Networks of Patronage in Contemporary South Asia

Team TAKE in Conversation with Lekha Poddar

Bhavna Kakar in Conversation with Kiran Nadar

Coming Of Age: India As The Epicentre of Contemporary South Asian Art

An Incredible Journey : Bengal Beyond Boundaries

Weaving Identity: Reclamation of Craft

Analogous Relation of Arts and Objects

Very Small Feelings

Chemould@60: From Framing to Futuring the Art of the City and the City of Art

Dark Was the Night

Memoirs of Unremembered Spaces: Between Nostalgia and Ecological Changes

Becoming for Voice Against Reason

Sudarshan Shetty: Between Ruin and Recovery

Beyond The Page: South Asian Miniature Painting And Britain, 1600 To Now

Decolonising Museums: South Asian Diaspora Representation in the United Kingdom

nafas: Isolation Diaries

When Indian Flowers Bloomed in Europe Masterworks of Indian Trade Textiles, 1600-1780, in the TAPI Collection

International Departures: Art in India after Independence

Bhavna Kakar in conversation with Yuko Hasegawa Digital Transformation Planet

Dilpreet Bhullar in conversation with Sunil Kant Munjal Celebration of Serendipity Arts Foundation

Of Reimagination and Revitalisation: Experimenter Curators’ Hub

Kavita Singh (1964-2023)

South Asia and Santiniketan

Faces Beyond Time: The World According to Ravinder Reddy

TAKE Features

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Review

Weaving Identity: Reclamation of Craft

The press release and curatorial essay for Seema Kohli's latest exhibition follows a predictable path, connecting the dots between her work and conventional themes. However, such a narrow interpretation only skims the surface of her boundless conceptual potential, hindering the opportunity for profound exploration. In her solo show, Kohli delves into the cosmic energy of femininity and the mystical world of medieval bhakti saints, while also inviting introspection through her intricate blend of images, materials, textures, and labor. These elements not only raise pertinent questions about the creation of value in a commodified society, but also shed light on the persisting caste hierarchies within artisanal practices. Her exhibition also illuminates the complex dynamics that emerge when craft practices intersect with contemporary art.

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Review

ANALOGOUS RELATION OF ARTS AND OBJECTS

Humans and objects share a very close and intimate relationship. Humans identify objects and establish a correlation which further is associated with time, while being recognised by human memory. Objects become a source to initiate pre-established relations of humans with time. Once identified, they add evidential value to time and space. The notion of time and space becomes an important part of the curatorial intervention in the exhibition Things are Vanishing Before Us by Gallery Dotwalk. It is through this that the viewer constructs and establishes the correlation between past and the present, and what posterity holds. The centrifugal force of the art work opens the room for a visitor to revisit the relationship with the past in the present, and how it serves as an opportune moment to shape the future. This, in the exhibition is achieved with the viewer’s familiarity with objects.

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Review

The Omnipresent Self

The river flowing through me…’ is an autobiographical landscape that is, at once, psychological, environmental, metaphysical and historical. - KP Pradeep Kumar The exhibition features Pradeep’s most recent body of works, which talks about artistic subjectivity as the internal self, and the constitution of the self in relation to the exterior ‘others’, to challenge the separations of eco-diversity of our times.

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Review

Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now

The exhibition Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now examines the traditions and legacies of South Asian miniature painting through major examples of miniatures from as early as the mid-16th century right up to the present day, with the re-engagement of modern and contemporary artists with the form. The exhibition brings together 180 works from private and public collections across the UK and internationally. This is the first time that many of the early miniature paintings from the Royal Collection, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the British Museum have been on public display. The exhibition is a chance to chart the trajectories and encounters between the traditional early miniatures, and modern and contemporary reinterpretations.

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Review

SUDARSHAN SHETTY: BETWEEN RUIN AND RECOVERY

The exhibition Only Life, Myriad Places attempts to create a transformational space, emulating the labyrinthian mind. Toying with existence in its many forms, succumbing to death and subsequent new or renewed beginnings after the course of its journey, leaving behind stories retold through the stillness of assorted totems, the idea of the perpetual process of rebirth and its continuum can perhaps be measured by the pace, evolution, and number of works and mediums presented.

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Unique, limited editioned and handcrafted affordable artworks by eminent artists exclusively commissioned for TAKE on Art.

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