Events of the week

Last journey

What: Recipient of the Audience Award for Best Brazilian Documentary, José e Pilar is a deeply moving story about love, loss and literature. The film follows the Nobel Prize winning Portuguese author José Saramago and his Spanish journalist wife Pilar del Rio during his last years, including the writing of his book The Elephant’s Journey. An incredibly intimate look at the lives of Jose and Pilar, that follows them from early 2006 until shortly after the release of The Elephant’s Journey in 2008. Directed by Miguel Gonçalves Mendes, the 117 minutes film in Spanish and Portuguese with English subtitles can be watched online.

When: May 3 – 9

Where: Website of India International Centre

 

Art and architecture

What: “Can a door speak to the sky? Can barbwires speak to land? Will the demolished city ever speak again to the complete plan? Do the cartographies of our lives exist eventually as dust or as loom? Are maps always, invincible squares or do they quiver sometimes?” Shrine Empire’s exhibition ‘ Spatial Dialogues’ explores conversations between architects and artists based on a range of materiality, dimensions, personalities, and imaginations. Working with each other, grasping ideas of form, extending them into each other’s terrain, the group show provides a third space for thinking of the built environment, architectural forms, and artistic effect.

When: April 6 – May 8

Where: Website of Shrine Empire Gallery

Close to nature

What: Gallery Espace’s “Boodi” (“ash” in Kannada) brings together recent works by artist G R Iranna that crystallise his sustained artistic engagement with the tree. Ash, an integral part of his recent practice, is at the centre of Iranna’s conceptual concerns in these works – not just as medium and a rich source of symbolic meaning drawn from ideas of philosophy and spiritualism, and social practice, but as the very residual matter of life, indeed of all nature and the consciousness that pervades it. Laden with blossoms, their dense foliage etched against the sky, Iranna’s trees are the very image of nature’s beauty and vitality. But it is a beauty harnessed to a core of strangeness, to contemplation of the mystery at the core of life.

Where: Website of Gallery Espace