India-Art
New Delhi, Jan 2014
The art
market in India is consolidating at a pace that has lent the country legitimacy
in claiming global status as an arts destination on par with Asian hubs like
Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Beijing — Asian power points that have become major art
exhibition and transaction centres. The India Art Fair — which opened as the
country’s lone official trade and exhibition platform for contemporary arts in
2008 — has been the catalyst in pushing the country’s Rs 2,000 crore ( nearly $
250 million) art market to frontiers that could not be imagined even 10 years
ago. The fair over the last five years has drawn the best of international art
houses, trade stakeholders and practitioners to make contemporary arts awareness
and business more relevant to the growing tribe of Indian art lovers and entrepreneurs,
who are eying art as a viable soft and profitable trade option.
The fair
serves as an acquisition counter for international institutions as well— which
are looking increasingly at Indian collections to add teeth to their contemporary
archives in terms of diversity, richness and affordability. The sixth edition of the India Art Fair Jan
30-Feb 2, 2014 has brought 30 international galleries and 47 national galleries
across 90 booths at the NSIC Ground in the national capital — to exhibit the
best of the international contemporary art across multi-disciplines including conventional
arts, sculptures, digital arts, projects, performances and speakers’ forum.
The India Art Fair has acted on the lines of the
market aggregator bringing artists and collectors on to a single platform, says
founding director of the fair Neha Kirpal. “Through the fair, we have been able
to give the contemporary art market in India significant exposure to the
international community and more importantly, increase in both awareness and the
number of collectors within the country. Over the last five years, the fair
with 400,000 visitors attending, we have seen a tremendous amount of engagement
with art — more than there has been over the last two decades. We have also
been able to contribute significantly to the intellectual conversation on the
art market with over 150 world class speakers,” Kirpal said.
This year’s
international galleries represent a mix — from returning European galleries to
a number of cutting edge new-comers who all share the common goal to “explore
the Indian art market”— forge key relationships and meet new collectors from
India. Galleries like the 1X1 Art Gallery (Dubai), Aicon Gallery (New York), Die
Gallery (Frankfurt), Gallery Lelong (Paris), Grosvenor Gallery (UK) and Indigo Blue
Art (Singapore) have returned to India on the strength of the response of
buyers from India— and the rising level of interest in art. The first-timers
from Spain, Germany and several emerging contemporary art houses from France
will try to test the market. Unlike previous years, big names like White Cube
and Hauser & Wirth, Lisson are missing from the list.
In addition to
gallery collections, an extensive Arts Project across outdoor and indoor fair
space is striving to open dialogue between the viewers, practitioners and
artworks. One of the highlights of this section is “Listen Up! —the first
public sound arts project to be launched in India. Curated by Tim Goossens and
Diana Campbell Betancourt and supported by 1after320 arts project, it is a
citywide installation to make sound art publicly accessible through cell
phones. Artist Dayanita Singh will present excerpts from her critically
acclaimed “File Room” series which was shown this year at the Venice Biennale.
Two
important collateral exhibitions — INSERT2014 — featuring 20 leading
international and Indian artists curated by Raqs Media Collective at the Indira
Gandhi Centre for Arts; and “Word, Sound, Power” — a collaborative exhibition
by Khoj International Artists’ Association and Tate Modern at the Khoj Studio —
will provide new perspectives to the fair. For the first, the fair is hosting
three museum showcases — the Himalayas Art Museum, the Kiran Nader Museum of
Art and the Mark Rothko Art Centre in Latvia.
The Speakers’
forum is hosting a galaxy of scholars — which include cultural theorist Homi
Bhabha from Harvard University, Chris Decon, director of Tate Modern in London,
artists Bharti Kher and Jitish Kallat from Mumbai, photographer Dayanita Singh,
art entrepreneur Budhi Tek and Phillip Dodd, Chairman of Made in China. The
education sessions revolve around “art and public”. Curator and art writer
Gayatri Sinha, who will be moderating several discussions, says the 2014 edition
of the art fair will expand further on the “core constituency of art — public”.
In the previous editions, the forum has drawn on Asia’s expanding role, institutions
and critique of the post colonial, market dynamics and changing aesthetic
values. “The umbrella subject of discussion of the speakers’ forum is the
Public and its Arts. Drawing us out of the narrow reading of locations, borders
and boundaries, nations and communities — the purpose is to understand how the
very definitions of the public is changing before our eyes”.
The reading
of the public in the last decade has been radically transformed, Sinha said.
“When there
is an aggregate of people they may mark a
visible public much like the agora of ancient Greece, however, there are
publics which are not visible, who defy the idea of an aggregate, who work
across different latitudes and political systems. Yet through networks of
mobility, they may form national or global opinion, effect policy, topple
governments, guide diplomacy and signal mass taste,” Sinha said. As emphasis shifts
to networks rather than communities — space becomes a curatorium, “affecting our
understanding of the public and its art”. “More than ever before, through its
vocal response, physical participation, monetary support and occasion, its
hands of destruction, the public confers on art, archives and material history
the reading of our future, but also of the past,” Sinha said. The participants at
the forum “have all transformed the way in which art is received”.
The fair in
2014 is turning its spotlight to China, founder director Kirpal pointed out. “For the first time, a major delegation of
Chinese collectors is attending the fair with a view to stimulate Indo-Chinese
cultural exchange between collectors and museums,” Kirpal said. In the last
decade, China has expanded its footprint in Asia and across the world as one of
the biggest art transaction market — with a volume that exceeds the Indian
turnover. With the freeing of the Chinese contemporary art from government
control, traffic to China from the western art worlds has shot up. Collaborations
with China in education, exhibitions and trade will help India retain its hold
over the Asian art market and project an Asian soft power bloc to the world.
“The art
fair has reached out to 67 art colleges around the country for an arts
management programme with a students’ internship programme and has served as a
market builder and commerce generator for over 400 Indian and international art
galleries from over 24 galleries from over 24 countries and enabled business of
hundreds of crores,” Kirpal said.
The focus of
the fair — despite its international soul and lens — remains India, Kirpal emphasized.
“At least, 50 per cent of the exhibiting galleries have always been India and
one of the chief purposes of the fair is to build and cultivate the Indian
contemporary art market, both internally and domestic level, but also
externally in terms of international cultural exchange,” Kirpal said. Since the
Art Fair began, there has been a growing level of engagement and participation in
the cultural scene across a broader range of sectors, including corporate,
retail, design and real estate.
“The market
has steadily grown – although there have been peaks and troughs. This can be
seen through events such as new gallery openings and public art spaces, new
auctions, the arrival of India’s first art biennale and the increasing presence
of Indian contemporary artist exhibiting internationally,” Kirpal said.
The founding
director of the India Art Fair said as an observer over the last five years,
Kirpal has seen the country transform into a more international art scene with
a “significantly higher quality of art production and presentation from the
domestic market, comparable to the global mix of art works from a curiously
growing base of international artists and galleries who are looking to start a
dialogue with the sub-continent”.
An important
shift in the developing scene is that the Indian artist today is in a position
to acknowledge and embrace “key social and cultural issues quite openly in
their art, without a hint of being apologetic or falling into traditional
Indian cultural clichés”.
Kirpal said,
this new proactive aspect of Indian art is forcing artists to “experiment with
a variety of mediums such as photography, video installations, text and sound based works and
performance art”.
India’s
share in the global art market is $ 250 million which is less than 1 per cent of
the total global art market which is currently worth nearly $ 60.8 million,
Kirpal pointed out quoting statistics. According to a recent report, the Indian
art market has risen over 485 per cent in the last 10 years, making it the fourth
most positive art market in the world in terms of growth projections.
“As an
alternative asset class, art in increasingly becoming a sunrise investment
option, especially as it is considered to be an effective hedge against inflation,
with defensive characteristics during weak economic periods and the India Art
Fair presents an environment by creating an open market that is fair and
transparent to facilitate business of arts along with inspiring confidence in
the much larger buyer base that exists out there not only for Indian but for
the international community,” the founding director of the fair said. In this
light, the fair presents not only platform for aesthetic exchanges, cultural
understanding — but a business forum as well, the key to sustenance of arts and
arts-related interventions worldwide.
Pointing out
the difference in the business model of the India Art Fair with that of Hong
Kong, Shanghai and Dubai — Kirpal said the “the big Asian art fairs are
destination showcases while the India Art Fair has been riding on the domestic
market”. “While a gallery split of 50 per cent Indian and 50 per cent
international, the fair is not just a commercial venture but a market builder.
So it is more local in spirit”.
-Madhusree Chatterjee
www.artsinfocus.web.com
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