Edition Copenhagen from T&T Studio on Vimeo.

Edition Copenhagen was founded in 1959 by Carl Urwald. Today the gallery has three partners Rasmus Urwald, Dannie Vieten and Peter Wissing Sørensen. The gallery is located at Christianshavn in Copenhagen and houses both a lithographic workshop and a gallery space. Edition Copenhagen is one of the leading lithographic workshops inEurope. Each year the gallery invites a number of international and Danish artists to create lithographs in the workshop. The invited artists have all exhibited widely in galleries, contemporary art centers and museums. Besides inviting established artists Edition Copenhagen also aims at working with new and upcoming artists. Thukral and Tagra were invited by Edition Copenhagen / Arken Museum for the same.

In an endeavor to create awareness about HIV, Thukral and Tagra, keep coming up with innovative give aways (merchandise) and activities, with their art work to help dispel misinformation about AIDS.

THE MATTER WITHIN: NEW CONTEMPORARY ART OF INDIA | 2011

As contemporary art becomes more widely recognized within India, there has also been a growing awareness of its international development and impact. YBCA is pleased to present The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India, an exhibition of sculpture, photography and video by artists of India living inside the country as well as in the diaspora.

Inspired by material culture, literature, spirituality, and social and political aspects of the history of the South Asian region, the exhibition is organized around three thematic threads that resonate from contemporary India—embodiment, the politics of communicative bodies and the imaginary. Of particular interest are the artistic practices that either incorporate these concepts or operate within a gap between these existing thematic categories. Whereas sculpture and painting have a long history within both sacred and secular traditions of Indian art, in recent years photography and video have emerged as significant media as well.

Until very recently, contemporary Indian photography has had little exposure in the United States. With a focus on “straight” and staged approaches, the photographic works utilize either reality-based settings—such as the informal street shoot or a formal portrait—or constructed realities and imaginary personas. These photographs merge the vision of the artist with the social dynamics of India’s vast cultural landscape to create a revealing narrative of contemporary life in an ever globalizing world.

Sculpture has a long tradition within both sacred and secular art of India, and its rich legacy of materiality and iconography has had an impact on contemporary art. Human and animal bodies continue to play an important role in new perspectives on nationhood as well as on ancient pasts. This is evident in an adherence to traditional forms as well as in expanded imagery and physical forms signaling the future.

Some of the video works provide a unique window into the lives of ordinary people. The artists are able to extract poignant and powerful narratives from complex situations, offering alternative forms of storytelling. Video also provides an opportunity for shaping multi-referential narratives examining contemporary conditions such as displacement and community formation, unlikely personages and lost artistic legacies, often against the backdrop of colonialism and other forms of occupation.

Working with ideas that are both highly personal and representative of the shifts and changes taking place in the global sphere, these artists are navigating the complex routes between the historical past and the present, fact and fiction, or new and old identities, during a period of societal flux. As India continues its expansion on the world economic stage, the work of its artists will become an even more widely acknowledged vehicle for expressing new ways of being that are hard to convey outside the terms that art provides. This exhibition hopes to further this potential by contributing to a better and deeper understanding of current shifts and their emotional, intellectual and spiritual effects on the artists and their communities, as well as the potential for representing new aspirations.

Thukral & Tagra use disposable bottles in installations and sculptures that depict the diaspora of India’s youth. On a series of bottles, Thukral & Tagra portray young Indian men whose visions of success assume leaving their home country.

With their latest group of works, Thukral & Tagra explore the bizarre mix of sentimentality, nostalgia and clichéd futurisms that is epitomized by the rising Indian middle class and especially in the burgeoning new city of Gurgaon, a suburb of New Delhi where the artists live and work. Gurgaon, a rising hub of manufacturing and information technology, is also a sprawling residential community characterized by faux-classical mansions, towering apartment blocks decked out like colonial bungalows, mega-malls dominated by globalized food courts, and steel and glass behemoths connected by dirt roads.

Thukral & Tagra’s frenetic mixture of high and low styles in paintings, sculptures and decorative accoutrements is an apt response to this bewildering and perverse urban reality typifying the “new India.” As part of the exhibition, on display will be the very first works Thukral & Tagra have produced at the historic Meissen porcelain factory near Dresden. Starting with classical vases from the Meissen archives, T&T pile them up into comical towers and paint them with their trademark imagery in candy colors.

Furniture pedestals and wall-mounted backdrops frame the porcelain centerpieces, contrasting the rarified material with more down-market plastics and laminates. The results are seductive constructions that bring the work of the late 19th Century Italian designer Carlo Bugatti into the 21st Century, via the Memphis design group of 1980s Milan and with sly references to High Modernism as it was bastardized in Post-Independence India. Nature Morte will present more elaborate Meissen works produced by Thukral & Tagra at Art Basel in June.

Related Links: www.naturemorte.com

Yet to be Exhibited!!

Related Links: www.hilger.at

Constructed Worlds in Abstract and Figurative Painting brings together 14 contemporary artists who employ the constantly expanding language of painting to build imaginary spaces that viewers are invited to enter, and to orientate and perhaps lose themselves within. Positing no baseline ‘reality’ against which these unfamiliar realms might be tested and ranked, the exhibition instead offers up an archipelago of possible realities, each of which’s ontological conditions are shaped by a particular painterly practice.

Identifying and reflecting upon the emphasis in much contemporary painting in creating visions of elsewhere worlds operating under elsewhere rules, the exhibition gathers together a polyphony of artistic voices that draw their political power from their confidence in building rather than destroying, in taking a position rather than merely quoting one, or quibbling from the sidelines. The word constructed in the show’s subtitle has been inserted with intent, suggesting as it does a space of shelter, a space to live and grow.

Related Links: www.maxwigram.com

In collaboration with the Vancouver Biennale the Richmond Art Gallery will present In Transition:  New Art from India.  India is experiencing a period of remarkable growth and transformation and its artists (like contemporary artists everywhere) are responding to these changes.  With an eye on its past and a view to the future, these artists are examining the social, political, economic and religious implications of becoming a major world economy.

The exhibition will feature installation-based work by six of India’s most recognized contemporary artists:  Shilpa Gupta, Reena Kallat, TV Santhosh, Sudarshan Shetty, artist collective Thukral & Tagra, and Hema Upadhyay.

Related Links: www.richmondartgallery.org

Related Links: http://www.naturemorte.com/

Related Links: http://www.naturemorte.com/