Aditi Chitre, Iram Ghurfan, Gigi Scaria, Kavita Singh Kale,
K.M.Madhusudhanan, Neha Thakar, Pooja Iranna, Samia Singh, Shakuntala Kulkarni, Srinivas Bhakta and Vidya
Kamat are the participating artists. As it is an ongoing
project more artists will be featured in the coming
sessions. As an exhibition strategy, VAF @ The Guild uses
both the plasma screens and projection systems to exhibit
the video and animation films. These works will be shown in
loop and after a week of the project’s commencement, the
videos and artists may change as more artists and their
works will add on.
“With the collapsing boundaries between different art genres
more and more interdisciplinary practices get space and
appreciation in the field of visual arts as a part of the
general cultural production. The galleries today are aware
of this fact and they have started facilitating such works
of art and projects. However, in India exclusive video and
animation projects are not still in vogue. VAF @ The Guild
is one of such pioneering efforts to showcase the videos and
animation films of the eminent as well as emerging artists
of India,” observes JohnyML, the curator of the project who
was also incidentally the initiator and curator of Video
Wednesdays @ Gallery Espace, the first ever year long video
art exhibition in 2008-09.
Internationally videos have been around in the mainstream
visual culture for a long time now. However of late
animation films as a genre of video making is gaining ground
and a lot of young emerging artists especially with training
in art/design/technology are experimenting and coming up
with new genre of works. By bringing video and animations on
the same platform, The Guild hopes to open up new dialogues.
While Samia
Singh, Iram Ghurfan, Aditi Chitre and Srinivas Bhakta invest
their energies purely in the creation of animation shorts
and movies, and also attempt to cut the barriers that exist
between the mainstream gallery oriented art practice and the
commercial use of such talents in the field of advertisement
and publicity, artists like Kavita Singh Kale move between
these two realms with equal verve by producing
advertisements, animation movies, paintings and sculptural
installations.
Academically trained in painting and graphics art, K.M.Madhusudhanan is
an internationally acclaimed film maker and the national
award winner for the best film (Bioscope- 2009). His short
films and videos are highly acclaimed all over the world and
his works have been showcased in MoMA and most other major
international film festivals. Gigi
Scaria is one of the participants in the Indian
Pavillion at the 54th Venice
Biennale 2011. His work titled ‘the Elevator from the
Subcontinent’ has been hailed as one of the happening works
in the ongoing Venice Biennale. Gigi is known for his
paintings, sculptures, videos, digital works and carefully
crafted sculptural installations that include video as a
major component in them.
Pooja Iranna and Vidya
Kamat have been directing their energies towards
articulating the liminal spaces of the city. While Pooja
takes architecture as a point of departure, Vidya looks at
the anthropological and mythological implications of the
women’s existence and identity as a focal point of her
works. Their videos also have caught the attention of the
art world.Neha
Thakar plays with the idea of tangible and intangible;
visible and invisible properties of the materials like
water, ice, smell, gas etc. The ice, which is the solid form
of water, turns in to water and finally to its origin
through the process of natural exhaustion.
