“…and it is something which grows in all directions” is curated by Noopur Desai, Pallavi Arora, and Samira Bose of Asia Art Archive in India, with support from Sneha Ragavan, Ӧzge Ersoy, John Tain, and Vidya Shivadas.
Exhibition Design: Shambhavi Gairola
Venue Support: Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA)
This exhibition was made possible by the generous support of the Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation.
“…and it is something which grows in all directions”
Asia Art Archive in India (@asiaartarchiveinindia) opened an exhibition of documents from the Mrinalini Mukherjee Archive at Project_Space at the FICA Reading Room in November 2022. As a display, it charts various impulses and tensions in Mrinalini Mukherjee’s practice, reading closely into what cannot be seen, and therefore ascertained, about the artistic research process.
At Project_Space, the exhibition showcased photographs from Mukherjee’s travels to art historical and cultural sites as documents of her artistic research process, alongside photographs of her in New Delhi—where she would experiment with unconventional materials, allowing for her works to grow and expand with improvisations. It also brought together documents that highlight installation instructions for her sculptures, and several sets of photographs that suggest the artist’s own compulsions to study her own work, where each sculpture is photographed multiple times. Opening up to new layers of meaning, the exhibition presented the archive of an artist as a proposition to read into the many possibilities of artistic research, its visibilities and tangibilities.
We were very pleased to have been able to welcome a variety of audiences to the display, especially through its accompanied programming. We saw artist and art educator Rakhi Peswani and anthropologist and philosopher Sarover Zaidi respond to the exhibition and extend its propositions on materiality, embodied knowledge, and the artistic research process. We were also very happy to host a workshop with artists Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Jeebesh Bagchi of Raqs Media Collective, where they revisited their writing on artistic research, reflecting on their engagements with interwoven histories, and their process of working with suppositions, facts, and hunches.
For more visit https://aaa.org.hk/en/programmes/programmes/and-it-is-something-which-grows-in-all-directions/search/keywords:and-it-is-something/period/past
Workshop | The Language of Birds: A Reading Session on Artistic Research with Raqs Media Collective
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2022
Time: 11:30am—3:30pm IST
Venue: Reading Room, Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), India
In this session, artists Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Jeebesh Bagchi of Raqs Media Collective revisited their writing on artistic research with participants, reflected on their engagements with interwoven histories, and shared their process of working with suppositions, facts, and hunches. The discussion also expanded on how artistic research can be read and made legible in archives.
Public Talk | Temperamental Disinclination to Convention
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2022
Time: 6:00—7:30pm IST
Venue: Reading Room, Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), India
This programme invited artist and art educator Rakhi Peswani and anthropologist and philosopher Sarover Zaidi to respond to the exhibition and extend its propositions on materiality, embodied knowledge, and the artistic research process.
