The 2023 India Art Fair Artists in Residence, feminist textile artist Lakshmi Madhavan, Warli artists and sibling duo Vayeda Brothers, and queer painter and performance artist Debashish Paul open up about their personal journeys and what drives them to create and challenge the status quo. The conversation will be moderated by Prateek Raja of Experimenter Gallery.
Debashish Paul: Debashish Paul explores the problems of queer identity in a society dominated by heterosexual norms. He has received the 2022-23- Prince Claus Seed Fund, and was the recipient of the 2022 Inlaks Fine Art Award, Contemporary LYNX, UK. Paul has also been selected for the Residency & Performance Programme by HH Art Space Foundation in collaboration with Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022-23, and is the artist-in-residence at India Art Fair.
Lakshmi Madhavan: Lakshmi Madhavan addresses concerns around identity, loss and restitution in her textile led practice. Her nomadic background translated into her urgent concerns around the body and its context of geography, gender, politics. She works between Mumbai and Balaramapuram, to create her textile based works involving the kasavu mundu veshti (traditional attire of Kerala). The kasavu became an umbilical cord for Lakshmi to not only traverse back home but also to investigate the socio-cultural history and heritage of the textile
Mayur and Tushar Vayeda: The Vayeda Brothers adapted the indigenous Warli style of painting to render new material to bring in different ways of depiction. The brothers, inspired by what they see, hear and experience during their travels, render it by returning to the basic grammar of their inherited style of painting, and adapt it to the unknown. In the process, they move the Warli tradition forward, without diluting its essence.
Prateek Raja: Prateek Raja is the Founder and Co-Director of Experimenter, and a Founding Member of the International Gallery Alliance (IGA). Established in 2009, Experimenter has gallery spaces in both Kolkata and Mumbai. Amongst other initiatives that Experimenter leads beyond its role as a contemporary gallery is Generator Cooperative Art Production Fund, which has supported 49 artists since its inception in 2020.
Titled ‘Align & Disrupt’, the talks programme curated by independent curator and educator Shaleen Wadhwana, and supported by Shiv Nadar – Institution Of Eminence, aims to align voices of leading artists and arts professionals on critical issues in the arts ecosystem, and collectively disrupt the status quo to shape a more aware and inclusive art world of the future. For the first time, the key learnings and insights from these talks will be documented in an action-plan which will be widely circulated and made accessible to the public on the India Art Fair website. All talks will be conducted in Indian Sign Language.