Convergence has been produced by intrepid travellers, writers, journalists, photographers and artists. The exhibits will span the colonial, modern and postcolonial periods of sub-continental history from the mid-nineteenth- century to the 1970s…reports Asian Lite News
Two new exhibitions, ‘Birth of a White Rose’ and ‘Convergence – A Panorama of Photography’s French Connections in India’, will open at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), Saket, on May 27 till June 30.
‘Birth of a White Rose’ will pay tribute to artist-pedagogue Somnath Hore whose practice cruised routes of social realism as well as humanistic modernism, mentoring the generations of students and artists.
Concurrently, KNMA will co-present the exhibition ‘Convergence – A Panorama of Photography’s French Connections in India’, curated by Rahaab Allana, along with the Embassy of France/The French Institute in India, Institut Francais and The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.
Hore’s show will unfold nuances of creative implementations of the artist, revelling 101 years of his birth, through a panoply of works rendered in the richness of diverse mediums. It will explore novel routes and appreciate creative imprints germinating from a philosophy of humanism of the master in remembrance.
Beholding the museum’s previous thematic exhibition-triad that mapped the abstract and non-figurative in visual arts, this time the exhibitions take the opportunity to look at ‘the figural’. Keeping in mind the havoc caused by the pandemic, where imposed isolations, losses and its resultant anguish, has commenced valuing the beauty of existence and survival, insisting to be attentive to realities of not just humans alone but embracing all living presences. This has prompted the museum to look at art that masterfully addresses the need to pause and observe life, as the humanistic values slip away in the momentum of presumed civilisational progress.
Convergence has been produced by intrepid travellers, writers, journalists, photographers and artists. The exhibits will span the colonial, modern and postcolonial periods of sub-continental history from the mid-nineteenth- century to the 1970s.
It will feature works of notable French photographers over broad spans of time, such as Louis-Theophile Marie Rousselet; a French traveller in India during the 1860s who met India’s first photographer king, Sawai Ram Singh II in Jaipur. Marc Riboud was a celebrated French photojournalist who worked for Paris-based Magnum Photos from 1953-78 and travelled all around Asia in the 50s along with the works of many other modern European masters such as Denis Brihat, Paul Almasy, Edward Miller and Bernard Pierre Wolff among others.
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