Opening on Thursday, February 26th, from 6 to 8pm
Exhibition Continues through March 21, 2009
Nature Morte will present new works by the Mumbai-based artist Archana Hande. Entitled "All is Fair in Magic White," the exhibition is primarily pictures made by the traditional method of block-printing on fabric with a twist. The artist has carved various characters, symbols, icons and scenographic elements from wooden blocks and combines them into rebus-like pictures. These are both self-contained pictures and long, narrative scrolls, both of which feed into an animated video which will be on view. The works employ traditional Indian picture-making and decorative techniques while the subject matter is wholly contemporary, speaking of the dual strains of urbanisation and globalization taking place throughout India today.
Archana Hande studied at the Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan and the Faculty of Fine Arts at M.S. University, Baroda and currently lives in Mumbai. She has had solo shows at Gallery Chemould and Lakeeren in Mumbai and Gallery Sumukha in Bangalore. Her works have also been included in important group shows such as the Guangzhou Triennale in China, the Yokohama Triennale in Japan, "India Express" at the Helsinki City Art Museum, "Horn Please" at the Kunstmuseum of Bern, and "The Edge of Desire" at the Asia Society in New York. This is her first show with Nature Morte and a parallel exhibition of works entitled "Relics of Grey" will be held at the School of Art and Aesthetics, Jawahar Nehru University in New Delhi from the 7th to the 30th of March; Nature Morte Annex is located at A-9, Shivalik Main Road, New Delhi-110017.
Nupur Jain, a research scholar at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU has written about Hande's project:
"All is Fair in Magic White" is a satirical account of aspiring, tumultuous, dirty and shockingly populated Bombay and its hope for a picture-postcard conversion into a global megapolis of the future. A touch of historicity complicates this troublesome vision by raising questions of power, class and race. A deceptively simple account of popular notions of female beauty reveals not only deeply entrenched cultural and economic inequalities in the post colonial city but also comments on disturbing repercussions of attempts at molding Bombay to resemble those cities that are now discovering far bigger problems of their own. An experiment that ingeniously employs traditional block printing techniques as aesthetic principles governing the storytelling art of this digital film, Archana Hande comments on life and art. She criticizes the Indian, still post-colonial condition that stimulates an incessant need for magic potions that some think might help
whiten existence in her part of the world.
