Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India
On view June 14 through September 17, 2006
UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive || www.bampfa.berkeley.edu
Project Space at Montalvo Arts Center || www.montalvoarts.org
University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) and Montalvo Arts Center collaborate to present Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India. Seen for the first time on the West Coast, this major exhibition brings together an extraordinarily diverse range of contemporary artists and works of art that reflect new perspectives on culture and politics in India today.
The exhibition will span San Franciscos East and South Bay communities with more than seventy works of art, including painting, drawing, sculpture, and video installations presented at BAM/PFA, and a selection of video and multi-media works on view at Montalvo’s Project Space.
Edge of Desire features the work of artists representing three generations. Some — including Nalini Malani, Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and Jeebesh Bachi), Ranbir Kaleka, Atul Dodiya, and Nataraj Sharma — have shown widely on the international stage. The exhibition also includes work by artists previously little known outside South Asia.
Nearly forty artists are represented in the BAM/PFA portion of the exhibition, which is organized around five themes: Location/Longing, Unruly Visions, Transient Self, Contested Terrain and Recycled Futures. Works in Location/Longing address the desire for place and the relationship with locations real and imagined. Unruly Visions is concerned with the artists relationships with the many guises of popular culture in contemporary India: the visual culture of television, advertising, cinema and Bollywood, and the unruly, mixed-up visions characterized by everyday life on the street. The section on Transient Self examines migration and transience as major features of the contemporary Indian experience. Works included under this theme range from personal histories and realist commentaries to fabrications of self-transformation. Recycled Futures encompasses works that conflate regenerating materials and renewal of tradition, and that are playful, often satirizing popular consumer culture.
The Montalvo portion of the exhibition includes video and multimedia works by four artists and artist groups: Tushar Joag of Mumbai, Sonia Khurana of New Delhi and Amsterdam, Nalini Malani of Mumbai and New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective and Mrityunjay Chatterjee.
Raqs Media Collective and Nalini Malani were in residence at Montalvos Lucas Artists Programs in 2005 preparing for the Montalvo-sponsored iCon: India Contemporary exhibition at last summers Venice Biennale. Malani will return to the Lucas Artists Programs this September.
An exciting range of lectures, performances, panel discussions and film screenings will accompany the exhibition at both venues. For more information, visit online at www.bampfa.berkeley.edu and www.montalvoarts.org.
Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India is co-organized by the Asia Society, New York, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia. It is curated by Chaitanya Sambrani.
The Berkeley presentation of Edge of Desire has been supported by the Consortium for the Arts at UC Berkeley and by Ginger and Moshe Alafi.
Montalvo Arts Centers Visual Arts Program is supported by generous gifts and grants from Jo and Barry Ariko, Jan and Neal Dempsey, Sally and Don Lucas, Penny and Greg Reyes, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and Montalvo members.
BAM/PFA
2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA 94720
Wednesday – Sunday 11:00 to 5:00
Thursday, 11:00 to 7:00
510.642.0808
Project Space at Montalvo Arts Center
15400 Montalvo Rd., Saratoga, CA 95070
Wednesday – Friday, 1:00 to 4:00
Saturday, Sunday, 10:00 to 4:00
408.961.5800
Press Contacts:
Rod Macneil, Audience Development Deputy Director
UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive
510.643.6494; rmacneil@berkeley.edu
Katy Rees, Public Relations Manager
Montalvo Arts Center
408.961.5814; krees@montalvoarts.org
