Students' Biennale 2021: Painted Multigenerational Narratives
Artists: Adithya Lakshmi KR and Bikram Dey. Curated by Adip Dutta.
Containing the Narratives
Adithya Lakshmi KR and Bikram Dey look at visuals derived from sources that are recognisable yet distanced. Political issues presented in the form of posed group photographs and more remind viewers of literary narratives marked with a sense of loss, suppression and protest.
Reflections of civilisation by Bikram DeyKochi-Muziris Biennale
Bikram Dey is a student of Bengal Fine Art College, Chandpara.
Using a mixture of watercolour and collage..
..he captures village life and memories.
A middle class family by Bikram DeyKochi-Muziris Biennale
The four-part watercolour work accesses photographs of families.
The blue tones create haunting images of his subjects.
Using rectangular boxes to highlight the faces of his figures, they become a grid of faces in the central two works.
Baby Kutty’s grandfather by Aditya Lakshmi KRKochi-Muziris Biennale
Adithya Lakshmi K R trained at the College of Fine Arts Trivandrum and Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati, Santineketan.
Perumantura School by Aditya Lakshmi KRKochi-Muziris Biennale
She paints in watercolour inspired by photographs from 1950s to 1990s in Kerala. She collected and analysed the photographs from this period and classified them economically, socially, culturally and worked with subdivisions like religions, traditions, availability of cameras.
Christian communities mainly took photographs purely because of accessibility. Memory was important to them, so they used photography to document religious traditions, like baptism adikurbana, weddings and even funeral ceremonies.
Adikurbana by Aditya Lakshmi KRKochi-Muziris Biennale
Her works capture how she perceives the photographs of earlier time through painting. She questions the existence of photograph before its actual time and space and how it creates an illusion of memory, while her painting reinstates the earlier emotive experience.
The Students’ Biennale seeks to complement and strengthen the fine arts education system in India and is the largest educational initiative of the Kochi Biennale Foundation. The fourth edition was led by a team of five artists and art educators – Adip Dutta, Archana Hande, Manoj Vyloor, Suresh K Nair and Vasudha Thozhur, and featured 314 student artists from over 62 education institutions across India to produce approximately 45 projects.
Compiled and Edited by Mala Yamey
https://experimenter.in/artists/33-adip-dutta/biography/
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