"New Direction in Old Media :: Post Conceptual Journey" group art show Curated by Rahul Bhattacharya at Trapezoid Art Gallery, D 16 South Extension 2 > 11am-7pm on 2nd September-16th October 2012

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Time : 11:00 am - 7:00 pm (Sunday closed)

Entry : Free

Place : Trapezoid Art Gallery, D 16 South Extension 2, New Delhi-110049 
Venue Info : Nearest Metro Station - 'AIIMS(Yellow Line)'

Event Details : 'New Direction in Old Media :: Post Conceptual Journey' group art show Curated by Rahul Bhattacharya. 

New Directions in Old Media is two-part show which endeavours to showcase the new direction that art production in India has taken and seeks to understand this very process of making whilst working with emerging artists who have very consciously resisted the Contemporary Indian Art stream. These contemporary artists in India have chosen the marginal life and have produced artworks in old media at a time when the digital and the cognitive, the technology and the conceptual dominated the art scene. They have, at every step, rebelled against the dominance of content and obsession with conceptual art and new media which have straddled art criticism and practice since the 80s. This new generation of artists has also moved away from the glossy surface and the spectacular, and are working more with the notions of aesthetic and the intimate.
The durability of post-conceptual art through the old media suggests that its practitioners have been re-fashioning and re-defining the medium with some of these earlier histories and aspirations in mind. For a post-1950s generation, such a ‘reconstruction’ of analogue artforms is not just an act of random cultural archaeology or ritual nostalgia and there has been a recognition of the contemporary, say painting practices which are contributing to new cultural directions. These new directions in taste and cultural archaeology position old media as a vanguard act, trading not only on the medium specificity of a post-conceptual re-visitation of Modernism (the ‘language of the mark, gesture and surface’), but that it should be equally receptive  to motifs taken  from contemporary culture and older narrative traditions of image-making. The artists selected for New Directions in Old Media have a deep understanding of the analogous art as experiential attempts to image emotion and observation in painterly form. In doing so, they suggest that old media can carry a new vocabulary, which is hybrid, grungy and visceral; often imprinting within their forms ‘narratives of the personal’.

Old media, new politics : Within the conventional Contemporary Indian Art production, the emphasis on manual/physical labour comes up as a kind of noise, a disturbance which takes away from the digital/conceptual art itself. This type of art which has come to dictate the art market for a long time emerged simultaneously with the global capitalism which swept the world two decades ago. Labour was sought to be omitted from the art and a clean, sterile, sophisticated, digitised practice which only projected the concept was developed. It is to the extent that the old media art practices refer to and embody forms of temporality, knowledge and subjectivity, which do not easily enter the concept of abstract labour of new media. 

Contemporary art’s investment in labour, analogue and old media assumes various forms and it is symptomatic of changes in the economy rather than expressive of a broader left consciousness in the arts. In other words, the rise of labour as a sign-reference in recent art does not amount to a political project, even if it indicates a departure from the staples of postmodernism and, in some quarters, the desire to provide an alternative to capitalist economic relations.

Participating artists : Syed Taufik Riaz, Mansi Trivedi, Preeti Agrawal, Akash Gaur, Nidhi Khurana Soni, and Vidisha Saini

Related Events : Exhibitions