Events of the week

Looking beyond

What: Gallery Threshold presents “From The Ordinary To The Extraordinary: Pandemic Still Lifes’ by V Ramesh. The process of painting engaged him over the pandemic in an intensive yet spontaneous quest to retrace his journey afresh by using watercolours and gouache. Ramesh looks for that transparency of being able to look through a membrane of a vessel and see whole worlds in its interior. Rather like the doha of Kabir which invokes the image of transformed worlds in the inner space contained in the water vessel. Ramesh’s water colours have that same quality of allowing the viewer to be able to look through something that is impermeable and instilling or imbuing these images with poetic metaphors. This has been liberating for him as besides re-looking at simple objects, he has succeeded in the grounding of imagery in time and place by re-imagining and even creating memory.

When: September 21 – October 16

Where: Gallery Threshold, Sarvodaya Enclave

Heritage of dance

What: India Habitat Centre presents an unique dance feature, reconstructing the history and heritage of Indian dance. IHC collaborates with Ashish Khokar, reputed dance critic, author, and archivist, for a focus on how Indian dance forms evolved, who were its chief architects and where these forms stand today. Through a series of specially curated dance films and features, with historical evidence from the famed Mohan Khokar Dance Collection, they bring to you a canvas of dance and dancers, stars and gurus of Indian dance. With its second episode being screened this week the film features over 100 star-dancers, gurus, groups, divas and doyens covering five generations. 

Where: Website of India Habitat Centre

Urban chaos

What: The city is no longer a modernist utopia. One may still find the pale afterglow of the imperialist imaginary of “white town” or the modern architect’s “radiant city” in many parts of urban India. However, for the common masses, such a place becomes habitable only when its alleyways and corners provide enough shade and cover, escaping the blinding radiance and panoptic sprawl of developmental modernization. Reflecting on this creative ambiguity of the postcolonial urban, KNMA offers a cross-section from its collection in ‘City Tales’. As these artworks present the city not as an outside realm but as an immersive lifeworld demanding multiple levels of existential and political involvement, the curatorial framework is divided into a few thematic clusters

Where: Website of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art