Temptress – By Aarnav Bos A new LP by Berlin-based Auroville youth One person’s paradise can be another’s prison. Conceptually this is a very simple idea to wrap one’s head around, but a surprisingly difficult one to accept and integrate fully. Wine and music is one thing, but beauty? Values? “We must draw the line somewhere…” […]
André Schöne’s installation at La Petite Maison in collaboration with Svaram represents an artistic principle that is neither old nor new, established nor ground-breaking. It is an expression of something that has been expressed many times before, yet is always in some way unrecognizable. “I’m not so interested in creating something new,” the musician/producer mused. “Whatever comes […]
“Sound objects” is how Berlin electronic music artist André Schöne calls the instruments produced at Svaram here in Auroville; the term lends a ready insight into his indelibly fresh take on acoustic-electronic fusions. The ‘crossover’ continuum has steadily become a no-man’s-land (that is, for the faint of heart), the landscape littered with all too many […]
Group painting exhibition at Kalakendra Art Gallery Presented by Art World-Sarala’s Art Centre and Bharat Nivas Until March 18 2022 Unity in Diversity is a spacious idea, and therefore one well suited to Auroville and its artists. Wandering through Kalakendra’s latest and aptly titled new exhibit, I found myself wondering- what other verbal umbrella could fit […]
Artist in residency, Harsha Durugadda from November 1st at Centre D’art was interviewed by Dhani Muniz Like so many more interesting artists, Harsha Durugadda’s work comes from a place of intense focus. This focus on the world around him does not lead him to conservatism; rather, it sharpens his view of his surroundings. With an […]
Walk In The Clouds A review of the exhibition by Jasmine Storey Held at Last School, July 20 to August 7 2021 There is something in Jasmine Storey’s installation that smacks of a particular lineage; not in a stiff-collared academic sense, but one more transcendental, Borgesian- indeed, “every writer creates his own precursors.” Well, the […]
In Rabindranath Tagore, India found and lost the greatest artistic symbol it never knew it needed. There is even an ongoing unwillingness, among his countrymen, to admit the full range of his talents; perhaps it was the snake-oil mysticism in which they saw him cloaked by deprecating foreign commentators that put them off? Or the […]
I’ve heard the phrase “I have no country” quite a bit… In a place like Auroville, it’s an inescapable sentiment. Built right into “Imagine”… I got a shirt with part of the line about dreamers written on it from one of the Visitor Center shops when I was 6, and refused to stop wearing it […]
After a healthy bit of frustration, I recently decided to try and make it a point to go to all exhibitions with a clear head- not even necessarily stone-cold sober, but without having read even the tiniest blurb about the artwork itself, what it’s about, nothing. The dry run is the master take. It was […]
It’s not often, in the largely insular world of modern art, that a work is allowed to simply speak for itself. It’s also a strange fact that many contemporary works can’t really speak for themselves, for they are grounded in what are essentially literary ideas; even avowed geniuses like Twombly, Basquiat and Ai Weiwei could […]
Down, To The Crossroads- Adil Writer’s Hunt for The Good Stuff “If I said anything sacrilegious, please quote me.” This was Adil Writer’s sign-off to me as I took off on foot out of Dana Community in the dusty afternoon light, after an interview that shed more light than I’d ever hoped on the creative […]
Installations are the Biggest Deal in the contemporary art world. In terms of both influence and prestige, they’ve arguably outstripped old standbys like painting and sculpture (and it really wouldn’t be much of an argument), while lending an entirely new air to the galleries, museums, plazas and public spaces they populate, each piece a bigger […]
Morton Feldman, the more I dive into his life and work, seems increasingly like a quiet prophet that is still being digested by humanity. His fierce individualism was indeed just that- he was not interested in taking theoretical concerns to their limits, like his musical adversary Pierre Boulez. Feldman, together with John Cage, Christian Wolff, […]
Art in itself is a balancing act. But art that attempts to contribute something of worth to the contemporary dialogue, whether politically, socially, or in other forms of commentary, runs an exponentially bigger risk of falling flat. The artist that tries to do this is either consciously or unconsciously going against the very idea of […]
NOTES: OF STAFF & CANVAS Note1 – Back, To A Future-Leaning Past: Jazz and the visual arts have become fast friends during the past half-century or so. For a genre that’s been represented, for the greater part of its existence, by stark B&W portraits with lots of cigarette smoke and a bluish tint, the […]
The Quest For Movement- Why We Need Artistic Criticism in Auroville What makes a city a city? Not population, because then we’d be more of a Hamlet of Dawn than a City. Not big buildings, since Citadines, Town Hall, and Solar Kitchen are about the most imposing public structures we have, aside from the Matrimandir. […]
