India Art Fair: Empathy gets an artistic airing

The four-day India Art Fair gives Delhi-ites a once-a-year opportunity to enjoy a visual feast of South Asian art curated by no less than 60 art galleries and listen in to conversations between artists and experts. So you can admire late Satish Gujral’s Burntwood Sculptures and you can also listen in to a conversation with Atul Dodiya, who has had 32 solo shows worldwide.

The art fair is at NSIC Grounds, Okhla from 28 April to 1 May, easily accessible by metro.

A striking work of art is the 50-feet long mural painted by Aravani Art Project, a collective of trans artists. Founder-director of this initiative Poornima Sukumar will be part of a discussion moderated by independent curator and arts educator Shaleen Wadhwana.  Ayesha Singh of Art Chain India, Kriti Sood of LAND (Learning Through Arts, Narrative and Discourse) and Shilo Shiv Suleman of Fearless Collective will speak about the importance of peer-to-peer and independent support groups.

Sustainability is the theme taken up by Art Alive Gallery, which will be exhibiting 17 artists who work with sustainable material like clay, sun-hemp paper and discarded materials. The six artists in focus are Anil Thambai, Chandrashekar Koteshwar, Kaushik
Saha, Mahima Kapoor, Meghna Singh Patpatia and Vipul Badva.

An interesting ‘Auditorium Talk’ will be about how the South Asian aesthetic in art, design and architecture has gone global. Talking about this will be Sonali Rastogi, founding partner of the award-winning architecture firm Morphogenesis, Ashiesh Shah, architect and interior designer, Amit Gupta, editor-in-chief of the creative platform STIR and V Sunil, a leading name in art and advertising will discuss how each of their creative fields.