Photo Essay: 'Reminiscence of Home' by Dhiraj Rabha

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Photo Essay: 'Reminiscence of Home' by Dhiraj Rabha

Dhiraj Rabha takes us into a former United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) detention camp in Goalpara, Assam, where he grew up. Through his lens, he captures the essence of his community's resilience, illustrating how they uphold their heritage with unwavering pride. These personal and intimate photographs show a community forging a sense of belonging within the confines of what was once a detention camp, transforming it into a sanctuary they proudly call home. Amidst this backdrop, Dhiraj's work navigates the complexities of identity and belonging as his community grapples with their place in the wider world.

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'Thieves' Market' by Areez Katki

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'Thieves' Market' by Areez Katki

A very special piece from the New Zealand-based artist Areez Katki's recent body of work is Thieves' Market, which we were lucky enough to see in person at TARQ's booth at the India Art Fair 2024 in New Delhi. Thieves Market is a tapestry or frieze made up of several fragments that reference lost, excavated, and even stolen, objects and artefacts that are now mostly housed in glass cases in European museums, such as the Louvre and the British Museum. Each fragment is handwoven in the traditional Zoroastrian toran beadwork technique using Czech glass beads that the artist inherited from his maternal great-grandmother.

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Review of 'Mūḷ Māthī'

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Review of 'Mūḷ Māthī'

Back in 2021, Dior’s Creative Director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, collaborated with the Chanakya Atelier to reinterpret Madhvi and Manu Parekh’s paintings as hand-embroidered textile panels. Embroidered over the course of three months using both traditional Indian and couture techniques, these panels formed the backdrop for Dior’s spring-summer haute couture 2022 show at Musée Rodin in Paris. The tapestries travelled back to India last month, where they were on display at a special exhibition, Mūḷ Māthī, curated by the Asia Society India Centre at Snowball Studios in Mumbai.

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Photo Essay: 'Meet me in the garden' by Farheen Fatima

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Photo Essay: 'Meet me in the garden' by Farheen Fatima

Meet me in the garden is a series of staged portraits by Farheen Fatima, featuring the artist’s own friends. Taking its inspiration from their family albums and everyday scenes, the photographs have also been painted on. Together, the works are a portrait of the public park in North India, populated by people to whom it serves as a special space of leisure and intimacy.

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Photo Essay: 'A factless autobiography' by Debmalya Roy Choudhuri

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Photo Essay: 'A factless autobiography' by Debmalya Roy Choudhuri

New York-based photographer Debmalya Roy Choudhuri has been shortlisted for the prestigious Louis Roederer Discovery Award 2022, curated by Taous R. Dahmani. Choudhuri’s work will be exhibited at the 53rd edition of Rencontres d’Arles, to be held from 4th July to 25th September, 2022. Presented by the non-profit organisation, SPACE STUDIO in Baroda, Deb's shortlisted body of work— titled A factless autobiography— introduces three profiles based on a multitude of portraits illustrating the singularity of kaleidoscopic identities.

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The Magnificent World of Surrealism

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The Magnificent World of Surrealism

Out of the grim shadow of the First World War came the unbridled flourish of Surrealism. Over a hundred years later, Surrealist art is more significant than ever before. Delhi-based writer Radhika Iyengar writes about three surrealist artists from the Indian subcontinent: Bharti Kher, Arpita Singh and Rithika Merchant.

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A Review of N.S. Harsha: Stomach Studio

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A Review of N.S. Harsha: Stomach Studio

In Stomach Studio, Harsha’s first solo exhibition in New Delhi — currently showing at Vadehra Art Gallery — the artist keenly observes our current pandemic-ridden world with both humour and despair. Comprising a cast of outlandish characters, from an octopus-headed lamp-lighter to mutant rats making love, his works —ranging from quotidian to supernatural — allude to a sense of eccentricity as well as perceptive socio-political awareness. We asked New Delhi-based writer Riddhi Dastidar to review the exhibition.

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In Conversation with Habiba Nowrose

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In Conversation with Habiba Nowrose

Habiba Nowrose is a Dhaka-based photographer and researcher whose practice largely revolves around making staged portraits that explore the role of gender in shaping human relationships. Through the series Concealed (2013) and Life of Venus (2018), she attempts to address the notions of beauty, anonymity, and how women are often compelled to live up to societal and familial expectations. We speak with her about her image-making process, the challenges she has had to encounter through her practice and her experiments with the narrative form of traditional documentary photography.

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Photo Essay: 'Let Me Comb Your Hair' by Mika Sperling & Vasudhaa Narayanan

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Photo Essay: 'Let Me Comb Your Hair' by Mika Sperling & Vasudhaa Narayanan

During the COVID-19 pandemic, artists Mika Sperling and Vasudhaa Narayanan engaged in a call and response exchange, between Hamburg, Germany and Bangalore, India. Consequently, the quarantine forced them to look inwards with their practice — focusing on the language of care, family, intimacy, and the solitude surrounding their homes and neighbourhoods. The exchange between them explores tonalities and emotions that are both happenstance and constructed.

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In Conversation With Nibha Sikander

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In Conversation With Nibha Sikander

Nibha Sikander's artistic practice involves using layer upon layer of intricately cut out, coloured card paper to create critters, birds and moths, in all their marbled and mottled glory. Her deconstructed renditions of real and imagined creatures have an almost lifelike quality to them and are an attempt to quietly engage with the larger question of preserving the wonders that nature offers. Nibha tells us about her current work, her detail-driven process, and her inspiration from the coastal town of Murud-Janjira in Maharashtra, where she lives.

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In Conversation With Rajesh Soni

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In Conversation With Rajesh Soni

Rajesh Soni is a third-generation artist from Mewar, Rajasthan, who specialises in hand-colouring and painting photographs. His grandfather, Prabhu Lal Soni (Verma), was an artist and the personal photographer of Maharana Bhopal Singh of Mewar. His skills of overpainting photographs were passed down to Rajesh through the intermediary of his father Lalit. Rajesh talks to us about his longstanding collaboration with Udaipur-based photographer Waswo X. Waswo, an outcome of a rather serendipitous meeting.

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In Conversation With Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai

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In Conversation With Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai

Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai works with a range of mediums, from painting and printmaking to embroidery on textiles. While her artistic practice is primarily concerned with women and the space that they occupy, it is also informed by personal experience. Well-versed in Urdu, Persian and Arabic, language and script find their way into her artworks as well.

Arshi’s new exhibition and debut solo show, which opened at Blueprint 12 in New Delhi, showcases her latest work, Nafas or The Isolation Diaries. We caught up with the artist to talk about Nafas, her use of textiles in her work and her idea of home, while she lives and works between Kabul and New Delhi.

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Photo Essay: 'Dear Nani' by Zinnia Naqvi

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Photo Essay: 'Dear Nani' by Zinnia Naqvi

Dear Nani (2017 - ongoing) is a project that addresses issues of gender performance and colonial mimicry through the family archive. The photographs included in this project are of the artist’s maternal grandmother, Rhubab Tapal, who is performing the act of cross-dressing by wearing several different outfits that belong to her husband.

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Samanta Batra Mehta and Nirupa Rao in Conversation From Isolation

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Samanta Batra Mehta and Nirupa Rao in Conversation From Isolation

Samanta Batra Mehta and Nirupa Rao approach their artistic practice very differently, each with a unique voice and creative process. The work of both artists, however, is rooted in a love for botany. New York City-based Samanta works with illustration, text and photography to create multi-layered, mixed-media installations that draw connections between the environment and the human condition. Nirupa's botanical illustrations are inspired by her regular field visits into the wild–the most recent of which was to the forests of the Western Ghats. The Bangalore-based artist collaborates closely with botanists to achieve scientific accuracy.

Monsoon Malabar connected with Samantha and Nirupa via email to discuss their varied inspirations, love of books and how covid has changed the way they work in their respective cities.

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A Review of Amar Kanwar: Such a Morning

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A Review of Amar Kanwar: Such a Morning

Art in the time of Covid-19 imposes a new tolerance to a life online and given that so much online content is highly commercialised, or else trivia, prurient or sensational, the experience of visiting a virtual gallery, is unexpectedly enriching, through its required slowness and deliberateness. Amar Kanwar’s art has this power to arrest and the images onscreen stay in memory, but more immediately they summon up a line of writing that’s power has only increased in the age of the internet.

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8 Art Professionals on How They're Adapting to Isolation During the Coronavirus Pandemic

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8 Art Professionals on How They're Adapting to Isolation During the Coronavirus Pandemic

When people are confined to their homes, and the machine of the global economy comes to all but a screeching halt, art becomes a rare form of solace. Art also becomes a means of sharing experiences—the pandemic does not affect us all equally. Art reminds those who are lucky enough to have homes to be quarantined in, to remain employed and be financially stable—that there are many who are less fortunate. Art allows communities to engage with the world at large—it allows people a window into a world they would otherwise have no access to.

Monsoon Malabar reached out to art professionals from India and overseas, to discuss how the pandemic has influenced, affected, or changed their work—and what they believe the future holds for the world of art.

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Lola Mac Dougall on Setting up an International Photography Festival in Goa

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Lola Mac Dougall on Setting up an International Photography Festival in Goa

Lola Mac Dougall is the force behind GoaPhoto, which first launched in 2015 with the intention of taking fine art photography out of the gallery. Showing for three days from 6 to 8 December, 2019, in the quaint village of Aldona in North Goa, their new edition will feature site-specific exhibitions in six private residential homes. Over an email interview, Lola talks about her process of setting up the festival, tells us what to watch out for, and reveals the festivals from around the world that have been catching her eye.

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A Review of Moderne Maharajah at the Musée des Artes Décoratifs

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A Review of Moderne Maharajah at the Musée des Artes Décoratifs

Moderne Maharajah at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris brings together for the first time 500 rare photographs, pieces of furniture and fine objects that tell the story of the stylish life of Maharaja Yeshwant Rao Holkar II of Indore considered one of the pioneers of modernism in India. 

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Art from the Mountains: An Exhibition of Pahari Paintings at The Met

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Art from the Mountains: An Exhibition of Pahari Paintings at The Met

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is currently hosting an exhibition of artwork from the Pahari tradition of North India. Set in an intimate gallery in an annexe of the Southeast Asian Art section of the museum, “Seeing the Divine” offers a small but invaluable selection of Pahari works—including those by notable artists like Nainsukh and his older brother Manaku, who are well-recognised by Indian art historians. I was fortunate to speak with the exhibition curator, Kurt Behrendt.

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In Conversation with Stephanie Douet & Roshan Chhabria

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In Conversation with Stephanie Douet & Roshan Chhabria

Coming from diverse backgrounds and different parts of the world, Stephanie Douet and Roshan Chhabria first connected via Instagram while chatting about the British Raj. This developed into a collaborative series titled Indo-Anglian Conversations, which was exhibited at the India Club in London. We caught up with Stephanie and Roshan to talk about their artistic collaboration, creative process and the way their works have been influenced by one another.

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