The Guild Gallery in Mumbai Hosts Video & Animation Film Festival

Mumbai.- The Guild Gallery is pleased to present a Video and Animation Film Festival (VAF @ The Guild, 2011), a first of its kind project in Mumbai. Curated by Delhi based curator and critic, JohnyML, this project revolves around the new concepts of video and animation film making in the contemporary art world. The project will be on view until July 15th. Aditi Chitre, Iram Ghurfan, Gigi Scaria, Kavita Singh Kale, K.M.Madhusudhanan, Neha Thakar, Pooja Iranna, Riyas Komu, Samia Singh, Shakuntala Kulkarni, Srinivas Bhakta and Vidya Kamat are the participating artists.  As it is an ongoing project more artists will be featured in the coming sessions. As an exhibition strategy, VAF @ The Guild uses both the plasma screens and projection systems to exhibit the video and animation films. These works will be shown in loop and after a week of the project’s commencement, the videos and artists may change as more artists and their works will add on.

“With the collapsing boundaries between different art genres more and more interdisciplinary practices get space and appreciation in the field of visual arts as a part of the general cultural production. The galleries today are aware of this fact and they have started facilitating such works of art and projects. However, in India exclusive video and animation projects are not still in vogue. VAF @ The Guild is one of such pioneering efforts to showcase the videos and animation films of the eminent as well as emerging artists of India,” observes JohnyML, the curator of the project who was also incidentally the initiator and curator of Video Wednesdays @ Gallery Espace, the first ever year long video art exhibition in 2008-09. Internationally videos have been around in the mainstream visual culture for a long time now. However of late animation films as a genre of video making is gaining ground and a lot of young emerging artists especially with training in art/design/technology are experimenting and coming up with new genre of works. By bringing video and animations on the same platform, The Guild hopes to open up new dialogues. While Samia Singh, Iram Ghurfan, Aditi Chitre and Srinivas Bhakta invest their energies purely in the creation of animation shorts and movies, and also attempt to cut the barriers that exist between the mainstream gallery oriented art practice and the commercial use of such talents in the field of advertisement and publicity, artists like Kavita Singh Kale move between these two realms with equal verve by producing advertisements, animation movies, paintings and sculptural installations.

Academically trained in painting and graphics art, K.M.Madhusudhanan is an internationally acclaimed film maker and the national award winner for the best film (Bioscope- 2009). His short films and videos are highly acclaimed all over the world and his works have been showcased in MoMA and most other major international film festivals. Gigi Scaria is one of the participants in the Indian Pavillion at the 54th Venice Biennale 2011. His work titled ‘the Elevator from the Subcontinent’ has been hailed as one of the happening works in the ongoing Venice Biennale. Gigi is known for his paintings, sculptures, videos, digital works and carefully crafted sculptural installations that include video as a major component in them. Pooja Iranna and Vidya Kamat have been directing their energies towards articulating the liminal spaces of the city.

While Pooja takes architecture as a point of departure, Vidya looks at the anthropological and mythological implications of the women’s existence and identity as a focal point of her works. Their videos also have caught the attention of the art world.Neha Thakar plays with the idea of tangible and intangible; visible and invisible properties of the materials like water, ice, smell, gas etc. The ice, which is the solid form of water, turns in to water and finally to its origin through the process of natural exhaustion.  Actor Naseeruddin Shah stares out of a single-shot video frame while a poem scrolls across:”I have to conclude my lord…… that you tricked me to serve you.” in Riyas Komu’s 13 minute video.

The Guild Art Gallery represents emerging and established contemporary artists and works for the long term development of each artist’s career, presenting their works in international galleries and museums as well as placing works in collections. The Gallery has a dynamic program that stimulates observation, discourse which help to reflect and represent the complexity of contemporary culture. The expanded new space allows for a diversity of aesthetic expressions including films, lectures, conversations, residencies, workshops and other educational initiatives. Visit the gallery’s website at … http://www.guildindia.com