Poetics of the Real and the Imagined

The exhibition, curated by Latika Gupta is presented by the Charles Wallace India Trust (CWIT) in collaboration with British Council India. The five artists presented in this exhibition span a generation, at least. Anupam Roy is amongst the newest of CWIT grantees, he was awarded an MFA by De Montfort University, Leicester in 2020. Dr Pallavi Paul (2015) and Ranjit Kandalgaonkar (2018) were both supported to do their residencies at the Delfina Foundation and at Gasworks respectively. In 2012 Dr Varunika Saraf went to Cambridge, UK to do a fellowship at the Centre for South Asian Studies; and Ranbir Kaleka was amongst the earliest artists supported by CWIT during the 1980s.

Contemporary art that seeks to ask challenging questions about our world and about the human condition, has always been a part of the Charles Wallace India Trust portfolio and perhaps it is needed now, more than ever.

Curator’s Note Poetics of the Real and the Imagined presents an intergenerational perspective from CWIT alumni Ranbir Kaleka, Pallavi Paul, Varunika Saraf, Ranjit Kandalgaonkar and Anupam Roy, who spent time in the UK from the 1980s to 2021. Across these years they collaborated with a variety of institutions in practice and research-based programmes supported by the Charles Wallace India Trust.

All five artists in this exhibition have a deeply committed practice that is rooted in socio-political ideas of justice and equity. Their work draws on poetry, realism and dreamscapes, to underline and communicate, in a variety of media, the relationships of human subjects to each other and to history; relationships that are manifest in everyday contemporary life— be it the experience of urbanity, or ancestral and subsistence bonds with the earth. The migrant body, the laboring body, the trans-body inhabit in-between spaces, grappling with questions of identity based on gender, language and caste as they navigate places and lives that are rapidly being transformed in the global south.

The works selected for the exhibition bring our attention to a world that is increasingly marked by natural and man-made disasters, climate change and ecological precarity.

Art has the power to hold a mirror to life while also bearing the promise of liberatory and emancipated futures.

In this exhibition, even as we bear witness to fragile bodies alienated by hyper-capitalism and its attendant oppressions, we recognise individual resilience and collective solidarities forged in the intertwining of experiences.

Poetics of the Real and the Imagined is presented at the British Council, New Delhi.

Anupam Roy

Anupam Roy’s practice reflects his experiences and observations in the hinterlands of rural Bengal where he currently lives and works, the urban landscapes of metropolitan Delhi, as well as in Central and North Eastern India where he has engaged in different socio-political movements. He studied Visual Art at Ambedkar University, Delhi and did his second MA in Fine Art from De Montfort University, Leicester, UK supported by CWIT.

Broken Cogs in the Machine, 2019, Black ink and Wiggle eyes on Nepali handmade paper

Anupam’s works have been exhibited at several exhibitions, including the 2018 Triennial: Songs for Sabotage, New Museum, New York, and his first institutional solo show at Project 88, Mumbai in 2019. He is the recipient of the 2018 FICA Emerging Artist Award and as part of the award, he recently did a solo show at Vadhera Art Gallery Delhi. Anupam has participated in different National and International Group shows, Seminars (SOAS, London); Online Panel discussions (organised by Bordeaux Montaigne University, France, 2021), Fairs like IAF, Delhi; Frieze London and New York and has published an Art book, Zines, interviews, articles.

Ranbir Kaleka

Across the five decades of his artistic activity, he has produced both a remarkable body of paintings, vibrant with phantasmagoria and epic disquiet, as well as a body of trans-media works that combine conceptualist sophistication with a calibrated opulence of image. During the last twenty years, Kaleka has orchestrated a number of arrangements of the painted image and the projected image, arranged so as to cohabit in the same space. However, he does not embrace the simple juxtaposition, superimposition or mixed use of media to achieve a pluralising effect. On the contrary, he produces a meticulously calibrated adjacency of media, with which to disrupt the civilities of the layered image. Kaleka’s images are only apparently simultaneous and palimpsestual. In experienced actuality, they are asynchronous: they lag behind one another, snag at one another, hold together in a spectral shimmer only to split apart in brief bursts before regaining a deceptive stability. In the subtle gap between the manifestations of these images, Kaleka breaks open a difference of spatiality, temporality, sensation and significance, making us intensely alive to the condition of viewerly reception. [From The Poetics of the Liminal Moment-Ranjit Hoskote]

Varunika Saraf

Dr. Varunika Saraf is an artist and art historian based in Hyderabad. Saraf has participated in several group shows such as Sangam/Confluence, Heidelberger Kunstverein (2020), Critical Constellations, Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, New Delhi (2019), Days Without a Night, Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi (2018), and Phantoms of Asia, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2012). In 2016 Saraf received the Amol Vadehra Art Grant. She was also the Summer Research Fellow at the Getty Research Institute, Visiting Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute, Florence, NTICVA Visiting Fellow at the V&A Museum and the CWIT fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge. In 2010 she received the Senior Research Fellowship from the UGC. Saraf holds a PhD and an MPhil in Visual Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, and an MFA in Painting from S. N. School, University of Hyderabad. She is represented by Chemould Prescott Road, where she recently presented her third solo show Caput Mortuum. In 2023, her project, We, The People, a set of 76 embroideries, will go on display at the Sharjah Biennial.

Ranjit Kandalgaonkar

Ranjit Kandalgaonkar’s art practice primarily comprises a lens directed at the urban context of cities. His city-specific projects map vulnerability within redevelopment strategies of urbanisation, combative histories of reclamation/ speculation or record timelines and blindspots -alternate markers of a city that’s unravelling. His works respond to research conducted on modes of philanthropy practiced within community-based trusts; a subaltern imagination of the Bombay plague of 1896; subsequent loss of flora/fauna in colonial Bombay ; and a long-term project on latter day 20th century ship-breaking and invisible shipping infrastructures. They attempt to unlock trapped data through placing the work in the context of an unseen social history. Awards & fellowships include; Majlis Visual Arts fellowship, UDRI Architectural fellowship, The Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence, The Wellcome Trust Seed award, SAI Harvard University Artist Residency and the Gasworks Artist residency. His work has been exhibited at UCL-Cities Methodologies, Bergen Assembly Art & Research Triennale, OCA Norway, S.a.L.E Docks, Sakshi Gallery, Gallery Ark, Maharashtra State Archives, BNHS Library, Colomboscope, Warehouse421, the Wellcome Collection, London. He lives and works in Mumbai, India.

Pallavi Paul

Dr Pallavi Paul is a visual artist and film scholar living between New Delhi and Berlin. Her practice interrogates how the idea of “truth” is produced and argued in public life. Paul is particularly interested in the tension between the document and its aesthetic utterance – the documentary. She has received her PhD in Film Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her work has been exhibited at venues including the Berlinische Galerie (2022), IFFR(2020), Berlinale Forum Expanded (2022), Tate Modern, London (2013); AV Festival, New Castle (2018, 2016); Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon (2018); SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2019, 2022); Contour Biennale, Mechelen (2017); New Alphabet School, HKW Berlin (2020, 2022); The Rubin Museum, New York (2019). She was the recipient of the DAAD Artist in Berlin program 2021-2022, and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the ICAS:MP fellowship programme in New Delhi.

In our specially commissioned film we walk through the exhibition with Latika Gupta, curator of 'Poetics of the Real and the Imagined'. Press play to watch Latika’s guided introduction to these five artists.

All of them work across different media paintings on paper and canvas, video and also combining these to create art that is remarkable both visually and conceptually.

Read on to find more information about the artists and you can also browse the E-Catalogue which includes forewords from Jonathan Kennedy, Director Arts at the British Council in India and Shreela Ghosh, Secretary of the Charles Wallace India Trust.

Download the E-Catalogue

ExhibitionM BoardmanJanuary 6, 2023