Writing
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Ahmedabad, 18-20th September.
In Primo Levi’s 1946 short story ‘I mnemagoghi’, or ‘The mnemagogues’, a doctor named Montesanto has developed an olfactory process of recall by concocting chemicals which replicate smells from isolated moments of his life. He invites a junior physician, Morandi, to unstopper the vials and remark upon what he smells. There is a moment in the…
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RA Summer Show, Zubarán
It was 7.37pm on a hot Friday. Admittedly a very hot Friday, which might precipitate the swollen numbers in the icy halls of the Royal Academy. There could easily have been 500 people there. I couldn’t help but feel that an important thing was unfurling itself before my eyes, or rather, less solipsistically, an important…
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Interview with Harleen Kaur, early June 2025
GV : What world(s) does your work want to exist in? HK : My works is deeply influenced by personal memory (but more recently I have been thinking/wanting to see what would happen if it meets at the intersection of personal memory and collective history – more specifically personal memory and how individual experiences carry…
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Anwar Jalal Shemza, 1928 – 1985
Shemza was born in Simla, now Shimla, and went to school in Lahore, then India, now Pakistan. It would be trite to try and render the dislocation of such circumstances. Perhaps you can do the thinking better than me. The context is that he graduated in 1947, a year in which several of his relatives…
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Bhupen Khakhar, 1934 – 2003
Bhupen Khakhar was the opposite of anachronistic – modern? That doesn’t seem to cover it. His paintings are sensuous, brave, graceful, perhaps (aphorisms invited) ahead of their time. Born into a middle-class Gujarati family in Bombay in 1934, he trained as a chartered accountant, and only aged 28 did he start to make art. He…
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Vishwa Shroff, b.1980
A Mumbai based artist exploring architectural forms. Shroff’s practice sits between geometry and architecture. Her drawings bristle with clipped precision and invite questions about our relationship with buildings when they are in front of us on paper. There is something reassuringly analogue about the arrangements she composes. Perhaps it’s the peaceful, self-contained combinations of mathematics.…
