A fair to remember

Mumbai’s very first art fair will offer a feast of contemporary practices, thought-provoking art and glitz, building on the city’s cultural authority

Over the past few years, art has become increasingly accessible to the Mumbaikar, with regular initiatives from galleries and museums—in the form of walkthroughs and educational programming—and events like Art Night Thursday, Mumbai Gallery Weekend and Mumbai Urban Art Festival, opening vibrant avenues for collectors and art enthusiasts. Though the city is ripe with art goings-on and termed India’s culture hub, there’s still a regular comparison with New Delhi, which has successfully been playing host to the India Art Fair since 2008. But change is afoot, as Mumbai prepares to host its very first art fair next week, at Mahalaxmi Racecourse.

Hair, 2001 by Vivan Sundaram. Pigment print. PIC COURTESY Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

“Not only the financial and cultural capital, Mumbai is also home to some of the country’s oldest galleries and most revered artists. We’d been discussing organising an art fair here for a few years, but the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown meant we had to put those plans on hold,” says Minal Vazirani, the president of Saffronart who has co-founded Art Mumbai.  Planned as an immersive celebration of art and the city across four days, the fair features a dynamic lineup of 53 galleries, foundations and prominent art institutions from India and overseas. Vazirani adds, “We have come out of the pandemic noting that the art market was growing tremendously, with 2022 ending as one of the peak years for auction sales of South Asian art. This was an important inflexion point which boosted our resolve to introduce a commercial art fair to the city this year.”

Life of The Party by Ricky Vasan. PIC COURTESY Galerie ISA

For its inaugural edition, the fair has been planned to place a significant emphasis on fostering a sense of community, and designed to be inclusive and welcoming to not just high net worth individuals and collectors, but also the wider public, budding collectors and young students. “The primary goal is to enhance art accessibility, promoting engagement within the art ecosystem and the community. We hope all the events and energy of the fair combine to create a vibrant atmosphere for visitors and democratise access to the purchasing of fine art that includes modern, contemporary, indigenous art and antiquities,” shares Dinesh Vazirani, the CEO of Saffronart and co-founder of Art Mumbai.

The team behind Art Mumbai comprising (clockwise from left) Conor Macklin, Sumanth Ram, Dinesh Vazirani, Rhea Kuruvilla, Nakul Dev Chawla, Teesta Bhandare and Minal Vazirani

Notably, renowned art fairs across the globe have been showcasing Indian art for years. For example, Art Basel, where Indian art was shown for the first time in 2006. This year’s Frieze London, too, featured a fascinating line-up of galleries from across the country. However, Conor Macklin, director of Grosvenor Gallery, London, and co-founder of Art Mumbai, points out that the fair market in the West has become over-sophisticated, losing a great deal of energy and charm in the process. “There is a distinct proliferation of art fairs in the West with too much focus on one group of artists and galleries. We are cognisant of that and hope to be able to bring that learning to Art Mumbai. An art fair is a rich platform to see several galleries at one venue, eschewing the need to make several trips to different city centres to view art.” 

Here’s a handy guide to navigating the fair—to catch the most promising booths and programming highlights.

Aicon Contemporary

Showcasing a collection of paintings, sculptures and tapestries by Indian and Pakistani artists, the New York-based gallery will be bringing forth Keralan artist Tom Vattakuzhy’s simplistic and nostalgia-driven artworks. “If one asks me what I paint, I would shrink away as I do not have a straight answer. I do not work to mould myself into any political or ideological tag. For me, art is a meditative solitary journey, and I am concerned with exploring the psychological moods and feelings that I experience. I do not have any words to describe it. At best, what I can say at this moment is that I am a painter of interiors—interiors of lives I see around, lives of the silenced, the marginalised and the alienated,” he muses.

Emami Art

With a show titled Insoluble Time, the booth of the Dubai-based gallery will feature intergenerational artists reflecting on humanity’s fate and urgent socio-political issues. The highlight of the show is Bangladeshi photojournalist and teacher Shahidul Alam—one of the most influential photographers of our time—who has captured pivotal South Asian vignettes through his photographs taken towards the turn of the last century.

Alongside Alam’s works, West Bengal-based painter, printmaker and weaver Sibaprasad Karchaudhuri’s abstract pieces echo troubled landscapes; and Kolkata-based Anjan Modak’s drawings and paintings portray the working class struggle against capitalism. Vadodara-based Ali Akbar’s collages critique contemporary politics through memory and identity; and Arpita Akhanda from Santiniketan explores migration and memory through paper weaving, symbolising intertwined histories and existence.

Experimenter

After spending his childhood in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Manama, Kolkata-based ‘clothes maker’ Kallol Datta went on to study womenswear at Central Saint Martins, London, graduating in 2006. Today, he engages in structural experiments in pattern cutting and traditional geometry, to create silhouettes akin to textile sculptures.

Bringing together his ongoing inquiry in native clothing practices across south-west Asia, north Africa, the Indian subcontinent and the Korean peninsula, Datta’s work is rooted in an exploration of abstract forms constructed in textiles that question material and their apparent tenacity. Datta also reflects upon the notions of reconstructing, repurposing and restructuring donated pieces of clothes that hold memory, emotion and history.

Galerie ISA

For this fair, Galerie ISA brings together a range of artists from across the globe with works spanning techniques, traditions and styles that unite in a quest to break down traditional social constructs, and explore evolving identities and changing environments. Indian-born, California-based artist Anoushka Mirchandani’s bright and vivid self-portraits offer more than just an autobiographical lens into her life as an outsider living in a foreign country. They hold layers of intergenerational memories and nuances that question the identity and repeated experiences of womanhood, the gift and burden of ancestry, and carving out what it means to truly come to terms with living a dual existence. 

Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

The Delhi-based museum’s booth will feature prominent drawings, sculptural objects, and photographs from the late artist Vivan Sundaram, who passed away in March this year at the age of 79. His expansive body of work and practice opened up radical approaches and new thinking in contemporary Indian art, and through his lifetime as an artist and activist, he remained committed to making art with a purpose, spotlighting social, humanist and political concerns, and running threads of melancholy and death.

With his work, he created immersive experiences and spatial structures for viewers through installations, with elements, figures, influences, and playful inspirations drawn from artists such Amrita Sher-Gil, RB Kitaj, Bhupen Khakhar, Nalini Malani, Jeram Patel, and Himmat Shah.

Natesan’s Antiqarts

In a break from contemporary art, hop over to Natesan’s Antiqarts’ booth for a view into the fascinating world of antiques and heritage objects—from a ninth-century Varahi stone figure from the Nolamba dynasty in today’s Karnataka, to a 17th-century pichwai from the Nathdwara School, Rajasthan, depicting Sharad Purnima; and an illustrated cover from an 11th-century Jain manuscript from western India, quite possibly one of the earliest forms of Jain paintings.

“At Art Mumbai we are showing high quality sculptures from various regions for viewing as part of our art awareness initiative, with a mix of stone and wood objects, and paintings across diverse periods ranging from the second century up to the 19th century,” shares the owner Deepak Natesan.

Sculpture Garden

As an initiative to highlight art in outdoor spaces, the sculpture garden will comprise two sections of a garden area—one which highlights animals and nature and their correlation with man; and the other moving into human forms that hold a correlation to elements of the Earth. Showcasing a range of captivating sculptures, the garden will include New Delhi-based alternative art gallery Black Cube presenting Phaneendra Nath Chaturvedi, Dhananjay Singh, and Valay Shende, displaying a range of materials from bronze with patina to stainless steel; and Dhruva Mistry’s sculpture titled Doodledom in Cherry Red.

Shrine Empire

In a group show by the Delhi-based gallery, Madhya Pradesh based artist Awdhesh Tamrakar’s series The River at Dusk stands out for delving into the largely unrecorded narratives of the Thathera community—a Hindu and Sikh artisan community, whose traditional occupation is the making of brass and copper utensils.

“Intricately weaving together the forgotten tales of my community and their fading metal craft, my artwork serves as a visual documentation, shedding light on the history of Pancham Nagar—my ancestral village—which is now only alive in stories and memories. Each ceramic tile, meticulously attached with hammered and etched brass sheets, captures a fragment of the river’s essence, intertwining with remnants of diverse structures,” Tamrakar shares.

Space Studio

If you’re a young collector or keen on starting your journey collecting art, look out for not-for-profit organisation Space Studio’s booth. The Vadodara-based foundation dedicated to supporting emerging artists and projects—offering studios, resources and support to artists to nurture their creative practice since 2005—will be showcasing six artists who are alums of the residency. Presenting works by Shaik Azgharali, Akshata Mokashi, Harman Taneja, Timeblur Collective, Sashikanth Thavudoz and Ahalya Rajendran, we have our eye on Rajendran, who was a recipient of the Nasreen Mohamedi Scholarship Award in 2019.

Vadehra Art Gallery

In a group show with legendary artists, from Atul Dodiya and Shilpa Gupta to MF Husain and Sudhir Patwardhan, Delhi-based Vadehra Art Gallery will be showcasing American-Pakistani contemporary artist Zaam Arif’s works for the first time in the city. Of his Mirror series, the artist is said to create landscapes that go beyond mere imagery, observation, or imagination. “I aim to encapsulate not just the surface but the very essence of reflection itself. Through this work, I invite you to experience the connections between the self and their surroundings,” he relates.

Art programming

For three days, a slew of panel discussions, live events and performances will offer key insights and storytelling, adding a sense of dynamism to the fair. The most noteworthy of these on Day 1 is the speaker series, Women to Watch—a conversation between five artists about championing women in the arts.

This is followed by The Making of a Museum: From Passion To Institution, where art collector and philanthropist Kiran Nadar will discuss how her keen passion for the arts evolved into an diverse and intricate collection that is now the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art—an iconic South Asian Museum shaping a new cultural corridor. Collectors old and new can also look forward to a series about navigating the laws of art, estate planning and copyright law.

A screening of the film Picturing Life captures the life and work of eminent painter Sudhir Patwardhan, while a book launch and discussion with seminal artist Jogen Chowdhury reflects on the artist’s life and art. At regular intervals, art walk organisers Art & Wonderment will be conducting guided walkthroughs of the fair.

There’s also a glitzy side to Art Mumbai, with fashion designer Tarun Tahiliani launching his book based on the intersection of fashion and Indian aesthetics. Karan Johar, the fair’s cultural ambassador, will be in conversation with Dinesh Vazirani on culture, the city and cinema. Attendees can also look forward to stand-up comedy, music and culinary experiences.

WHAT Art Mumbai 2023
WHERE Mahalaxmi Racecourse, Royal Western India Turf Club, Mahalaxmi
WHEN November 16 to 19, from 11 am to 7 pm
TICKETS available on Paytm Insider

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