Events
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9, 11 AM - 9 PM
SAMIT DAS OPEN STUDIO
Samit Das opens the door of his studio to share the outcome of his research and the works produced during his residency in Paris with the Pernod Ricard Fellowship. He will also present new drawings inspired by the Indus civilization and its history to link them to a new archaeology: the one that draws the passage of Indian artists in Paris, as part of his exhibition Punascha Parry (On view at Villa Vassilieff until December, 23rd).
Atelier Pernod Ricard: Back end of the alley, green door, first floor.
Entrance free of charge.
Silmituanously, from 11 am to 1 pm
India-France: Artistic Exchanges. The launch of the new issue of the journal "Marg".
Roundtable at Villa Vassilieff
Coordinated by Devika Singh (Global Art Prospective, INHA / Center of South Asian Studies, Cambridge University).
With: Samit Das (artist, art historian, Pernod Ricard Fellow 2017), Pascal Monteil (artist), Raïssa Padamsee (art historian) & Laurent Brégeat (filmmaker), Maël Renouard (writer and French translator).
This roundtable will give the floor to the contributors of the new issue of the Indian magazine "Marg", edited by Devika Singh on the subject of artistic exchanges between France and India. It will revisit the history of these encounters, the resulting artworks and the question of the representation of the other that haunts the artistic approaches of India.
Artist Samit Das, art historian Raissa Padamsee (daughter of the artist Akbar Padamsee) and the filmmaker Laurent Brégeat will also take part, witnesses each in their own way of a new global approach to modernism, nourished by subjective narratives and peculiar meetings.
Conversations will be alternately in French and in English.
Tea and coffee will be offered to visitors of the exhibition.
BIOGRAPHIES OF CONTRIBUTORS:
Samit Das(1970, Jamshedpur, India) studied fine arts at the Santiniketan Kala Bhavan before attending a post Experience program at Camberwell College of Arts in London through a British Council Scholarship. As an artist, he specializes in painting, photography, interactive artworks, artists’ books as well as in creating multi-sensory environments through art and architectural installations. He also has a deep interest in archives and documentation.
Samit Das had several solo shows as well as group shows in India and abroad. He was notably part of the Dakar Biennale, Senegal. He has documented the Tagore house Museum In Kolkata (1999-2001). Samit Das started his research on Santiniketan Architecture during his MFA studies, which resulted in a book titled Architecture of Santiniketan: Tagore’s concepts of space (Niyogy Books, Delhi). He has curated a few history-based exhibitions like The Idea of space and Rabindranath Tagore and Resonance of Swami Vivekananda and Art of Nandalal Bose. He was awarded a BRIC scholarship to visit Italy. His artist’s book, Hotel New Bengal, was released in 2009 (Onestar Press, France). He was recently awarded a Research scholarship from ProHelvetia New Delhi to visit Switzerland.
Pascal Monteil is a French artist who divides his time between France and Asia.
He worked with Christian Lacroix on the play La Forêt des coeurs sombres (Centre des
arts, Enghien-les-Bains, 2003) where Lacroix was costume designer and Monteil set designer. Another one of their collaborations was the exhibition Carte Blanche
à Christian Lacroix (Musée Cognac-Jay, Paris, 2014). Monteil has also showcased his works at the National Museum, New Delhi in 2013.
Maël Renouard is a philosopher and writer. He has taught at the University of Sorbonne and at École Normale Supérieure. In 2013, he was awarded the Prix Décembre for his first work of fiction, La Réforme de l’opéra de Pékin (The Reform of Beijing Opera). In 2016, he published a literary non-fiction book about the internet, Fragments d’une mémoire infinie (Fragments of an Infinite Memory).
Devika Singh is an art historian who specialises in modern and contemporary Indian art and architecture. She is an affiliated scholar at the Centre of South Asian Studies of the University of Cambridge and a member of the Global Art Prospective at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA) and holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. She was previously the Smuts research fellow at Cambridge. She is currently writing a book on artistic practices in post-independence India for Reaktion Books and has contributed to many art magazines and exhibition catalogues as well as to the journals Modern Asian Studies, Art History, Third Text and the Journal of Art Historiography. Her work has received the support, among others, of the Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art (Max Weber Foundation), Trinity College (Cambridge), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the British Academy, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauch Dienst (DAAD), the Kluge Center, Library of Congress, Washington DC, the INHA and the French Academy at Rome (Villa Medici). She curated the India pavilion of Photo Dubai Exhibition (2016), co-curated the exhibition Gedney in India (Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, 2017; Duke University, 2018) and is a guest curator of the next Dhaka Art Summit (2018).
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 16th, 2PM - 4PM
Meditation in movement session by Janine Bharucha.
Full capacity.
“I Meditate In Movement. Capitalized, I MIM. The MIM I teach is made of a succession of simple, effective movements, accessible to all with a short length. Through different movements, static postures, shifts, you will develop the awareness of your body in space, control of balance and concentration. “ By Janine Bharucha.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4TH, 4PM - 7PM
Sieste Électronique #1 : Music for an art center
Carte blanche to Les Sieste électroniques.
"While the music is more portable than ever and we spend most of our time listening to automatically generated playlists according to our “moods" ("sunny afternoon","dynamic household” or even "time capsule"), we wonder about our ability to collectively share a carefully selected playlist for a particular time and place.
For this first Sieste électronique at the Villa, we invited the English label Dream Catalog, pioneers of a dematerialized music that develops a powerful symbolic imaginary."
For more information about Les Sieste électroniques.
For more information about the label Dream Catalogue
OFF-SITE EVENTS
Gondwana Series: Interventions by the Clark House House Initiative at Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Curated by Sumesh Sharma.
October 25 to 29, 2017.
Centre Pompidou, Place Georges-Pompidou, 75004 Paris, France.
A series of talks and film screenings are choreographed in an attempt to bring forth a discourse on diversity and the context of artist practices of the moment in South Asia. Historical reading of facts, myths and folktales comprise in forming modernist visions of the state. Dr. BR Ambedkar, the architect of the Republic of India refrained from forming a nation but rather a Republic ascertaining symbols of neutrality drawn from Buddhist iconography, that would help chart the identity of the union. In a society that officially recognizes more than 22 official languages, contains the diversity of opposing faiths, contests its ethnicities between the ideas of the Indo-European migration and the Dravidian South, we speculate a visual culture. A society that is still possessed by a silent apartheid of caste that then manifests in complex class divisions, modernist aspirations of development define the contemporary. We inhabit an India that houses a burgeoning economy and a fascist right promising the deliverance of a departure from a past but also a rewriting of a history to claim past civilizations and hope for a dishonest renaissance. What contexts allow us a narrative and where do we start to speak of these questions? Modernism in India can de defined and deconstructed by the movements of social justice that then authored a constitution that developed a secular character in form and format. The symbols of the nascent Indian Republic took on the vocabulary of the Ashokan Empire, its iconography in the form of the Lion Capital of the Ashokan Pillar from Sarnath and Nandalal Bose was invited to decrorate the constitution that would be rectified by the assembly on the 26th of January 1950.
Gondwana is the tectonic plate that formed when India broke away from Africa and joined the Asian Geographical mass. The subcontinent of South Asia was formed, a region divided by terse political lines and disunity. Home to more than 1.5 billion people, Indian hegemony is challenged by many mutinies and this clearly manifests in the production of art. The Gondwana Series, the name of this choreography of talks, screenings and performances, draws from Cheikh Anta Diop’s definition of Indian civilization, one that was derived from Africa.
October 25, 6 pm: Black? Political Consciousness beyond nation, Black identities in India.
Conversation with: Kemi Bassene (artist and musicologist), Amol K Patil (artist), Yogesh Barve (artist).
Moderation: Paul Goodwin.
Screening of films by Yogesh Barve, Naresh Kumar, Ranjeeta Kumari, Amol K Patil, Saviya Lopes et Parachar Naik.
October 26, 6 pm: The Scape for a Modern - Films by Jean Bhownagary.
Conversation with: Samit Das (artist and art historian, 2017 Pernod Ricard Fellow), Eric Stephany (artist) and Mélanie Bouteloup (director of Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research & Villa Vassilieff).
Moderation: Sumesh Sharma.
Screening of films by Jean Bhownagary.
October 27, 6 pm: Kinematic Modern.
Conversation with: Aurelien Froment (artist), Aurelien Mole (artist & photographer), Virgile Fraisse (artist & researcher), Ahmadou Badiane (musician), Somnath Mukherjee (choreographer and dance teacher).
Screening of films by Aurélien Froment, Virgile Fraisse et Hsiai-fei Chang.
October 29, 5 pm: Transculturalities & the idea of India
Conversation with: Kader Attia (artist and reseracher) and Jihan El-Tahri (artist and documentary film maker).
Moderation: Shaina Anand (CAMP).
Screening of films by Kader Attia and Tyeb Mehta.
The Gondwana Series is supported by Kadist Art Foundation.
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