Indian artist Navin Thomas recently recieved a bunch of press for winning the SKODA prize for Indian contemporary art. Unfortunately his latest sound installation at Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi is garnering attention for an entirely different reason.
In 2011, India moved from the classification of “developing” country to that of being a “newly industrialized.” This upgrade was made along Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, Philippines, Brazil and China, all of which have economies showing promise towards becoming “developed.” Perhaps as a salute to this increase of stature, India had its first pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale with an exhibition curated by Ranjit Hoskote aptly titled, Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode.
Urban Knits, a small book of colorful photographs, explores a relatively new kind of graffiti called “urban knitting,” self-proclaimed to be the most “inoffensive” type of urban graffiti. Like most books of its kind, a collection compiled by theme, Urban Knits unintentionally shows the wide discrepancies in quality that exist in all forms of art, but that are especially prevalent in graffiti and street art. When the impetus for making art is not exclusively about the quality of the work itself but rather about the act of leaving a mark, the results are often less than imaginative. This seems to hold true for tagging as well as knitting.
Indian painter Maqbool Fida Husain has accept Qatari citizenship but the issues around his story are complex. Often depicted as a straight-forward case of censorship, reporters often gloss over the fact that the painter, often called the “Picasso of India,” has chosen to live in a nation that censors far more than India.
… P.S.1′s Brooklyn is Burning event gets out of control last weekend … #class gets invited to Pulse … a HUGE statue of Amenhotep III is discovered in Luxor, Egypt … Milan Fashion Week includes protestors peeved at Anna Wintour’s quick ditch.
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