The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai, Ministry of Culture, Government of India

National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai

Ministry of Culture, Govt. of India

Sir C. J. Public Hall

Mumbai- 400 032

The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai, Ministry of Culture, Government of India, is presenting an exhibition entitled ‘Music and Goddess’. The exhibition is directed by Ranjit Makkuni founder of Sacred World which explores to build bridges between techno and traditional cultures.

Ranjit Makkuni is an international multimedia researcher, artist and designer.  A graduate in architecture from the reputed IIT Kharagpur, Ranjit Makkuni perceived his masters in Design Theory and Methods from University of California. With involvements in many prestigious institutions Ranjit Makkuni is also member of the mentoring group of Nehru Memorial Museum, New Delhi, constituted by the Prime Minister of India.

‘Music and Goddess’-The Exhibition at NGMA (M)

The genesis of art dates back to the early age of humanity. Here we see Makkuni bringing in the rich panorama of artistic forms and designs- from ancient to modern. Going beyond the boundaries of physical landscapes, he brings in multidisciplinary art forms and designs with cords of music and spreads a labyrinth beyond imagination. With this one of its kind exhibition Makkuni communicates a vision for the re-discovery of solitude. Art and Music was never so beautifully brought together.

This exhibition presents advances in interactive art through an exploration of the science, art and spirituality of Music, and its reflections in the Goddess images across Asian cultures. Ranjit Makkuni makes the exhibition a spiritually musical and gracefully interactive. It simply makes a lay person spellbound. It is an audio visual treat for the art and music lovers. The exhibits not only play music but allow viewers to interact with the instrument that plays it and the creative installation that bares it. Majority of the instruments show a connection with the Goddess Sarasvati and hence create a mesmerising spiritual ambiance. The journey to the musical world spreads over the holy pagodas and Bodhisattva paintings. The mystic aura of rhythm leaves the listener engulfed in streams of South East Asian Buddhist monasteries. The exhibition brings sound of music from each and every member of the Mother Nature like birds, bees, water, woods, human body and air.

Through a collection of interactive exhibits employing new musical synthesis based on traditional grammar, interactive multimedia installations and recordings of performances by masters, the project will allow viewers to enter the world of sound and its cultural and spiritual aesthetics.

The display of the exhibition presents both traditional and new instruments based on Indian Sitar, Burmese Saun Harp, Thai Xylophone, Korean Kayagum, Chinese Guzheng and Pipa, Vietnamese Dan Tranh, Javanese & Balinese Gamelan, chanting and many more. New instruments with embedded computation demonstrate interactions through gesture, touch, pull, movement, gaze and kinaesthetic action. In addition, through responsive computing, people by their position, gesture and movements control musical events in exhibition environment.

At National Gallery of Modern Art (M) we have an interesting exhibition inaugurated 28th of this month. And here are the attached details for the same (Press release and images).

Do visit the Gallery as it has much more to touch, see and listen. 

Gallery open from 11 am- 6 pm except Mondays and National Holidays

I Think (What?) ‘Packing Series’ paintings by Amit Kumar.

Art is a part of individual, community, society and whole world. It is necessary to know why it has so much importance since civilization began. Not many artists have tried to answer it through their art. Generally, an artist creates a piece of art according to the prevailing conditions, like his individual psychology, society’s culture and tradition, political conditions etc and that is all. 

Amit Kumar explores the avenue of highlighting the importance of art and its preservation and how it is preserved (visual art) by hand-painting it under his theme titled ‘Packing Series’ 

Artist Amit Kumar

Art plays a significant role in knowing the past of a country. Especially visual Art portrays the social, economic and political conditions of every era. It is a trusted clue of past. Artist Amit Kumar likes to hold on to these visual treasures and thus portrays them in his paintings.  According to him the works of past in every form of art like painting or literature has its unique symbolism and color. He likes to conserve these things and has come up with his ‘Packing series’ which is his most favorite series. All the paintings in this series are hand painted and as the name suggest- ‘packing’ he shows preservation of these paintings by meticulously painting bubble paper, corrugated paper wrappings around them. It is, as if he wants to keep the traces of history safely packed and saved for future generation. Since his basic objective is to show the preservation of paintings, he has painted varied themes not pertaining from different eras these do not belong to any particular age and there is no uniformity either. Like, he paints modern city, along with Statue of liberty, touches upon Indian Independence era by painting Mahatma Gandhi, presents unforgettable photograph of an Afghan girl, by painting it and showing it wrapped in buble paper et al. Therefore we find the mixture of different forms of visual art ranging from realistic, surreal to abstract. All the artworks help us to rewind the time and feel the difference between the then life’s experience which was different from our times. .According the artist, his art may have minimal value in this technical world his paintings. But it does not bother him and feels that as an artists he has every right to express his feelings without restrictions, no obligation of commitment and totally independent in Nature. Anything that attracted his attention has become his creation in this series. 

Recent work by Amit Kumar

The second series shows Amit Kumar’s keen interest in human psychology, especially of the layman or common man that forms the larger part of the society. The common man actually colors and shapes the characteristic of society. There is a standardized thread of thought among all the common people all over the world. It is ‘Ambition’, the desire to get more better than what one already has. He paints desires of mankind under his series called ‘Ambitious Mankind’. In this series he shows desires of common man. Desire of luxury, comfort, happiness, fame, money keeps life going on. These never ending desires are like the creepers as shown in one of his paintings. New leaves (hopes) represent tender desires unfolding, maturing, sustaining life until they are fulfilled or failed and then they shed away. Till then a new desire seems to bud from the same mind/heart (creeper). Even incase of choice of relations, human beings are often selective and yet, grass seems to be greener on other side and a person always feels dissatisfied with whatever he/she has and wants more and that is nothing but-  A desire. 

An avid lover of poetry and a poet by heart, Amit Kumar expresses his thoughts on desires in verse (Hindi) which states:

क़दमों में अपने जहाँ चाहता हुँ,

मै ज्यादा कही कुछ कहाँ चाहता हूँ l l 

सिकंदर भी हारा था हिंडोसितां में,

मै हारुँ नही, ये दुआ चाहता हूँl  

मै ज्यादा कहीं कुछ कहाँ चाहता हूँ?

मुझको बदनाम करने की साजिश है ये,

जो है मुमकिन नहीं, वो मकाँ  चाहता हुँl 

मै ज्यादा कहीं कुछ कहाँ चाहता हूँ?

(Translation): 

I wish to have world at my feet,

I do not expect more than this.

Alexendar too lost to India,

Pray I would never do.

Is it a great deal that I wish to?

It’s a cabal to slander me,

Explore the unexplored destiny.

Is it a great deal that I wish to?

Amit Kumar treats every painting as a poem and feels that every painter’s painting is but a poem expressed in visual form, full of emotions. He accepts the criticism that follows his analysis of calling painting as a poem. But he accepts the criticism and respects critics’ views. He feels criticism is necessary to probe into one’s own art and re-evaluate the creations. He is much concerned with the surprises that he gives to viewers through his paintings. 

Recent work by Amit Kumar

Viewers reaction is most important as the feelings in the paintings are spontaneous and succeed in tapping and resonating people’s emotions and make a place in their heart. People feel that his work is a collage of emotion and try to relate themselves with it. But according to Amit Kumar this is pure misunderstanding of his creations and viewers are surprised to know that it’s not collage at all. This ‘surprise’ itself stimulates Amit Kumar to create more suprisal works. Viewer’s surprise is a compliment for him and he considers that surprise of viewer is his success. 

I think, it will be apt to call artist Amit Kumar ‘A treasure hunter’ with lot of surprises in his creative mind. 

- by Pankaja JK

"Nine Blinking" Cobalt Blu Art Project

3rd Project coming soon

2nd Project "Nine Blinking"  Cobalt Blu Art Project

CORPOREAL CLAIRVOYANT AROUSAL - By Javed Jalil

The unmediated act of corporeal and cerebral inference of particles, starting from the subatomic to the synergies of the structural, moving into the realm of environmental visual references, creates reflection and illusions, modelled on our individual perceptive modes and prior understanding of things. The act of image visibility is an association of stages that incorporates our emotion, placement and reverberates with individual perceptions of recognition. It is formulated through expressive tendencies of weighing and evaluating its exterior content with ones’ own absorption and sentiment.

Javed Jalil as Art Critic

The visual world we perceive in our physicality creates various random interactive sources of content that is realized within us through the ways we have cultivated our patterns of consciousness. We can choose to be obsessed by certain elements from our existence and amplify the object, which can be in its animated or static nature, and we can project simultaneous vibrations, like a wave length of sensations and integrated dilemmas, to amplify the content.

Farzana Urmi is a painterly and searching artist who tends to involve herself into process of chaos emancipation, as a trigger point of stimuli, deflecting into a stormy vibration of moment, speed, instinct and paradox. It is as if she indulges the process of every particle being destroyed to unify into another functional state. It is like a big bang of neurons, as pigments accelerate through multiple energy sources, commuted with renderings of gesture and randomization. She appears like a passionate inferno, fusing existent external reality of the visible and invisible. Her senses are merged with environmental presence and redemption of restless moments. She focuses on scriptures of hard-core veracity of the emotionally heightened existence of our surroundings, with contents of deliverance and struggle. But why this relationship? Is it her existence within the surfaces of her living area or her inner commodity relating to certain attractions that behold her subconscious empathy - belonging to a string in a human chain?

Recent work by Farzana Ahmed Urmi

Recent work by Farzana Ahmed Urmi

The face and the portrait is her substantive motif of salvation, exploration and longing. It is the thesaurus of the manifestation of her energy. The face and its expression have been a matrix of surface recognition and introspection. But then again, it is also a landscape with layered dimensions of explicit subtle details of storytelling. Urmi in her paintings of faces, explored geo-surfaces of sensations that brutally and impulsively scrutinize the moment of interaction with picture-making surfaces, rather than having any likeness to its own identity. She creates her presence into what has been seen and remained unseen, thinking and analyzing and trying to grasp the effect that pulls her in, within the painted space of her faces. It is said that a face has 44 muscles and 7,000 micro-expressions that autonomously expose ones’ emotions. And there are seven major expressions that are universal. That means regardless of the structure and geo-placement, the major responsive moods of faces are similar. So, for an artist, all this micro-fraction of twist and turn are details of unlimited augmentation and sensation build-ups, like the construction of a surface or structure, resembling nature in its fleshy microscopic patterns that has spontaneous reflexes. Or states of absorption where surfaces, line and pigments refract an atmospheric stimulation.

The face is a reference of cognition with signs of inbuilt expressive manifesto and all these are directions through which visual artists incorporate their own metaphors and renderings, from hyper-realism to the zero recognition of the elemental and the material. Slices of various depictions and mannerisms configure the multi-stylization and temperament of time and place. For Urmi, the face has been a weight-bearing capacitor of her glancing animated tendencies, with a static and stiff disposition of the structural, where expressions are absorbed with the exterior play of strokes and pigmented arousals. The scattered micro-elements of landscaped bits of the faces are marks of ephemeral graphic metaphors of the individual and forces of moment and activity, overburdened with tenuous stresses of life and society. 

Her impulsive momentary dissections of signs and objects of intimacy, or the tendency to pour her momentary delusions and energy transmutations, are recognisable in her paintings.  It is almost an obsessive narcotic inducement of paint and surface, beholding the raptures of kinetic motional pouring. She feels lost in the race of interactive sensations of her surroundings and her being, so as to perform a voodoo-like dance of pigments dissecting each other, crashing and breaking edges, into life-like responses. She is definitely an expressionist but she has contemplated her act into a personal thirst of involvement with spirit and association.

In her recent works at the Dhaka Art Center she had also put out academic compositional studies, with ghostly glow of renderings, where the trend of making things aesthetically pleasing doesn’t concern her, rather the process of a very personal interaction of the moment stimulates her. She creates airy sitting figures with atmospheric delusions of colour as fragments of a light force, where forms are a vibration of light. She used patches of assimilated materials to unify and exaggerate the dimensionality of surface and emotional content .One of the noticeable factors are she, with her explosive pigment gestation, feels her way into the surface, keeping the anatomic stillness, and make overs the surface like a cosmetic makeup of sensation and atomic changes.

The painterly spectacle of her painterly attitude is attuned with the reality of the real as realized, and to comprehend it she exposes her identity with modulation of a corpulent tide of pigments and uncertainty, decoding the hesitation into a union of gestated ecstasy. The faces she paints may tend to be suffering insights of ones’ inner lingering thought but then again it could just be the ratification of our imagination where the strangeness is acceptable as, not beautiful but painful, but beauty can be realized by attaining the strangeness with perseverance, as acceptability reforms beauty in a new accordance. Strangeness is just a non-recognized validity of things, which slowly delves into the known and becomes commutable and comfortable within our psyche.  Urmi appears straight to the point in creating a source of interplay, rather than redecorate the visuals to become a recognizable likability. Her still lives and other objective elements are also driven manifested moments of engagement and the process of witnessing herself through it. The animated and the spirit overlap within her being. The demesnes to the visibility of the incorporated states of psychic prognosis are consents of the primordial instincts rather than sleek mind, body and psychic awareness. The psychological visibility is also our memory contained in imaginary nuances that tinge our psychic expressions with significant creative understandings, to validate a mystery. Our body, and infinite particles that binds together in a spinning space of motion and the decomposition of it, into a state of activity, can speak an animated language which is like entering a trance, that leads to illusion or a vibration of musical strings playing numerous resonances but in the same tune. Various perspective of our inner dimension makes us realize the re-echoed rhymes of the emotive. The curators of this exhibition focused on the markings of bio- landscape, the random impulses of abstraction, the grotesque approach opposing the aesthetically pleasing and the scheming process, and the artist’s momentary findings of the inhibited endowment of life.                                                                                                                                                               

Urmi intertwined her physical impulses into the medium, and used the recognizable, traversing the particles of the refractive into copulated state of another visual existence, as historically, with in the doctrines of art, this is considered the psychic connotation of the seen, thriving to see and create the unknown.   

- By Javed Jalil

D h a k a  A r t  C e n t e r  p r e s e n t s

Known Unknown

An art exhibition by Farzana Ahmed Urmi

On 16 October, 2014 at 6.30 pm

Eminent artist Monirul Islam

will inaugurate the exhibition and

Critic Moinuddin khaledwill grace the occasion as special guest

You and your friends are cordially invitedCurated by Wakilur Rahman and Kehkasha Sabah