Sharmistha Ray Studio is pleased to announce the sixth edition of Bellevue Salons for a conversation titled Pushing Boundaries: Design on the Edge on Wednesday, 13th January 2016 at 7.00 – 8.30pm at Tarq, a contemporary art gallery, located at F 35/36 CSM Marg, Dhanraj Mahal, Apollo Bandar, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400001.
This edition of the salon brings together a host of emerging voices from across India comprising of artists, practitioners and curators across a spectrum of artistic and audience engagement in the urban space, with broad perspectives on art, design and communication as a medium of contemporary expression – one with continuing political, social and cultural agency.
COLLABORATORS
Kunal Anand, Co-founder & Creative Art Director, The Kulture Shop, Mumbai. Kunal is a designer, artist and entrepreneur. Hailing from a small town in Zimbabwe, he left the sleep for the smoke and spent 10 years immersed in London’s graphic design culture. From individuals and start-up businesses to agencies and large organisations, Kunal has worked with a diverse range of clients and brands including: BBC radio and television, MTV, VH1, Sony BMG, Deep Medi Records, Foundation33, Stylo Rouge, Albion London, Digital White, Grandmother India, Bang Bang Films, Shiva Soundsystem and ASTI. He moved to Bombay at the end of 2010 hungry for new experiences – to be immersed in India’s changing cultural and economic landscape, and their effects on the art forms he loves.
Priya Gangwani collects queer stories. She is the co-founder of Gaysi, a popular South Asian platform for LGBTQ voice and expression. She is the editor and curator of The Gaysi Zine, a self-published annual magazine by Gaysi and is based in Bombay. She is currently exploring graphic as a space for performative text, where the discourse of Queer is moving beyond the cauldron of Indian Queer Literature. Gaysi has just released the latest issue of The Gaysi Zine, a Graphic Anthology which explores the subject of Queerness through the unique hybrid form of reading that employs visual-verbal literacy and rhetoric. This issue is both a retelling and an active work of various artists’ and writers’ attempt to sort through their own identity and acknowledge the queer element in their lives – the choices that fall outside the heterosexual hegemony.
Soghra Khurasani is a Baroda-based artist who works primarily with traditional printmaking techniques towards a highly aesthetic expression of gender and violence that is socially motivated, as a way of bearing witness to the atrocities that are committed against women every day in India. Khurasani’s solo shows include her debut ‘One day it will come out’, a collaborative project of Clark House Initiative and TARQ, Mumbai, curated by Sumesh Sharma and Hena Kapadia (2014); ‘Reclaiming Voices’, curated by Noman Ammouri, Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad (2014); and ‘To Speak for the Mute’ at the Gitler & gallery, New York (2015). Her selected group exhibitions: ‘Memento Mori’, TARQ, Mumbai (2015); ‘Regional Art Exhibition’, Lalit Kala Akademi, Chennai (2014); ‘Multiple Encounters’, AIFACS, New Delhi (2013); ‘Visual Evidence’, Clark House Initiative, Mumbai (2013); and ‘Interstices’— a collateral project of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2012.
Vivek Tejuja voracious reader, blogger, soon to be scribe. Vivek Tejuja is a self-pronounced bibliophile with extensive knowledge of graphic novels, and a blogger at The Hungry Reader. A Bangalore denizen, Vivek is the resident bookworm at Flipkart, reading and reviewing books for a living.
Founded in 2008, Gaysi Family is a social platform for all desi-identifying LGBTQ people. Its widespread readership and contributor base is spread across India, Australia, UK, France, USA, Canada and beyond. Since 2012 Gaysi has been curating and hosting events with the creative spirit in mind — the popular Dirty Talk (an open mic event), Read Out Loud (book readings), 2×2 Talkies (film screenings), and trivia nights. The Gaysi team comprises Anuja Parikh, Priya Gangwani and Sakshi Juneja.
SUPPORTING PARTNERS
Bellevue Salons by Sharmistha Ray is a platform by the international visual artist inspired by the tradition of Parisian salons to augment participatory modes of engagement with contemporary culture in surprising new ways.
TARQ: Sanskrit for “discussion, abstract reasoning, logic and cause”, is a contemporary art gallery in Mumbai dedicated to growing a conversation around art from a diverse range of contexts.