Two Gardens and a Kalamkari, lecture by Omana Eappen @ 1Shanthiroad

About the Talk
This presentation, studying the representations of the Deccani garden in 16th and 17 th century kalamkari textiles from South India looks at the importance of imagination and of rasa, emotional essence, in engaging with the past. Also about associations which are important in our culture like ornamentation, alamkara. How plants – animals – men – gods are a continuum, one often representing the other, one being treated like the other, just like representations of the past, present and future, are another continuum without sharp dividing lines. Omana Eappen looks at multiple ways of looking at the past – accommodating plurality in a country that is extremely diverse, which could be through combinations and multivalence. She looks at how intertwined textiles and gardens were, how the iconography of an image developed, markers of identity, and the many layers, political, economic, social, scientific - that are all woven together in our dealing with the past.

About the Speaker
Omana Eappen is the Managing Trustee of the Nauras Trust, Bengaluru – working on a project with the Archaeological Survey of India and the National Culture Fund to revitalise the 17th century Adil Shahi Gardens of the Ibrahim Rauza and the Gol Gumbaz (the tombs of Ibrahim Adil Shah II and his son Mohammad Adil Shah respectively) in Bijapur (now Vijayapura), Karnataka and on its related publication. Looking for evidence of gardens in textiles led to an in depth study of a rare group of 16th/17thcentury kalamkaris from South India. She is writing a monograph on these textiles for Jnana Pravaha, Varanasi. She is interested in relating these projects to our times in multiple ways to connect across the plural segments of our society.

Weaving in Weaving out- A show of drawings sculptures and installation by Sian Torrington

Siân Torrington is an artist from New Zealand, Aotearoa, who makes drawings, sculptures

and installations. Her work has been widely shown in galleries, festivals, and commissioned

for public spaces. She uses diverse materials to create structural forms which are expressive,

embodied and grounded in practice-based experimentation. Her work is experiential,

requiring the viewer to move around, through and inside, asking their bodies to respond in

space. Siân’s work is drippy and colourful, stuck and woven together, leaning and clinging to

existing structures, or building its own in defiance of straight lines and the upright.

Siân has been artist in residence for 3 months at 1 Shanthi Road, generously funded by The

Asia New Zealand Foundation. She has researched everyday skills and vernacular structures,

as well as local forms of arrangement; how things are hung up in shops or stacked building

materials. A particular focus of the project has been being a woman in India, and how to

express her femme identity in a new culture. How to find a place for it.

Skill-based, everyday making, such as flower-tying and bamboo- weaving have been a way

to connect with local practices of making.

“I want to make my own kind of offering towards these incredible skills which I see

everywhere. Skills that are a part of every-day life here. Skills which do not make people

rich. Skills which are hard to learn, and essential to life. To join together, beautify, bless,

carry and build.”

Siân is extremely grateful and humbled to be taught new skills, work with, and be gifted

materials by local women. This project includes the generous labour, teaching and time of

women without whom she would have remained adrift. Their conversations, humour,

sharing and openness have enabled her to weave her own way in and find connections in a

place that is completely new. This show is dedicated to them, and to female struggles,

community, expression and daily lives, everywhere.

See more of her work and read her blog about her residency here;

http://allmeaningisthelineyoudraw.wordpress.com

The Memory of a Deluge and the Surface of Water

Late Middle English: from Old French climat or late Latin clima, climat-, from Greek klima ‘slope, zone’, from klinein ‘to slope’. The term originally denoted a zone of the earth between two lines of latitude, then any region of the earth, and later, a region considered with reference to its atmospheric conditions.
Latitudes and Longitudes are imaginary lines. Atmosphere is invisible. Climates affect us, nonetheless, in unknown ways. 

Floods, quakes, winds but also capital and guns have altered geographies and disrupted memories. We live in an engineered climate today; created and destroyed by opposing political wills, pointless perversity, fossilized ideas, new technology, laughable exaltations, fear psychosis, new medical disorders, plastic flowers, fake encounters, torture labs, frothing drains. Snow in summers. The desire for the new world is conflicted between creation and destruction.

We wish to explore artistic renditions and vocabularies of damages and fissures that survive in such climates.
Maraa in collaboration with 1 Shanthi Road is proud to present


The Memory of A Deluge and the Surface of Water
a Collection of Text and Image Fragments by Art Students in the Srinagar Art College, Kashmir in the wake of the destruction of their College in a Flood in Autumn, 2014.

The deluge of September 2014 wrecked havoc in the valley of Kashmir. It besieged the homes of people, drowned the hearts of lovers, stormed the minds of poets, assaulted everything, everyday, while the waters rose. The memory of rising water remains embedded in everyone's memory in Kashmir, and has become impossible to forget or overcome.

This is what we celebrate here, in these short texts that the students of the Art College at Srinagar wrote, invented and performed after they left the flood in Kashmir behind them. For many months they travelled, with images of objects that had emerged from the flood waters in Kashmir. These images and memories of what the flood waters left in their wake became anchors for their practice, their education, their future as artists.
Join us for the exhibition, followed by a discussion with faculty and students from the college. 

Pre- and Early Chalukya Sculptures in Karnataka: New Research

Pre- and Early Chalukya Sculptures in Karnataka: 
New Research

a lecture by
Raghavendra Kulkarni
Art Historian, CKP, Bangalore

About the Talk: The presentation looks at new research in the pre- and early Chalukyan sculptures in Karnataka and their iconographic and stylistic influences. The introduction of Sanskritic culture, followed by the introduction of Jain and Buddhist faiths in the South in general and particularly in ancient Karnataka had left a strong religious influence. The artistic nuances manifested here were very interesting from the point of view of their style and also form. The sculpture as a result of the change developed with unique iconographic features. Some of these were common to other contemporary schools, but some have definite uniqueness. The sculptures that are datable to the Post-Maurya and Pre Chalukya and early Chalukya will be taken as the examples in the presentation. The early Chalukyas who ruled from ancient Vatapi-Badami in Bagalkot district were pioneers in introducing the new forms and features in sculptural art. Creativity and texts go hand in hand, where some unique sculptures were introduced for the first time in Indian art history.


About the Speaker: Raghavendra Rao.H.Kulkarni is Professor of Art History and Head of Department at the College of Fine Arts, Karnataka
Chitrakala Parishath, Bangalore. He has extensively worked on Pre- and Early Chalukya sculptural art and was awarded with a PhD Degree from Mysore University for the same subject. His published books include Pre- and Early Sculptural Art in Karnataka- Origin and Development ( 2010), Kinnala Art (1992), Early Sculptures in Karnataka (2011), and Artists’ Impressions (2011) on Yusuf Arakkal. He has also published over 50 research papers on sculptures, architecture and mural traditions of Karnataka. He is presently working on Narrative Art in Karnataka Temples, and editing the Encyclopaedia of Visual Art in Kannada, being published by IBH Publications, Bangalore. He is Co-Editor of the Prof. Ratan Parimoo Felicitation Volume, to be released in 2016.

Making Space for Art - Book Launch

Finally, 1.Shanthiroad has gathered all that we did through images and words. "Making Space for Art" is a repository of memories from the past twelve years.