TAKE Features
Review
Echoes of Ephemera: Party is Elsewhere
If a thing of beauty is a joy forever, as English poet John Keats would have us believe, then what is to be made of a show that highlights decrepitude? Is its job to remind us of the ephemeral nature of life and everything in it? That the value of the grotesque and the repulsive is in its mere existence, as it allows pretty perfection to stand out further? Or, alternatively, does the unpleasantness itself hold value as a much-needed contrast to whitewashed ideals? These are some of the questions that come to mind upon browsing through ‘Party is Elsewhere’, a multi-artist showcase which took place in February this year as an India Art Fair Parallel offering.
Read More
Review
On Unequal Burdens: Waste and Toxicity in Navjot Altaf’s New Works
The collective title of the paintings, Waste Archive as Landscape, suggests they are meant to be archives. If so, they are archives that are out of reach, whose contents cannot be discerned. Perhaps this effect is a reference to the impact of the limitless cycles of production of products that humans cannot entirely grasp or catalogue. On the contrary, those who live on the edges of landfills, both humans and nonhuman living beings, suffer the consequences viscerally.
Read More
Essay
Art Muscle
The wrestlers in traditional miniature paintings are presented differently from the bodies that dominate contemporary fitness culture. Their physiques matter, but they are rarely the central subject. Attention is directed instead toward movement, technique, ritual and the communities gathered around these practices. What emerges is a vision of strength that is fundamentally relational rather than individual. The muscular body was certainly present, but it had not yet become the primary object of attention that it would later become in the worlds of bodybuilding, fitness culture and social media.
Read More
