Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Indian government honours 10 contemporary artists with national awards 2014

India-Art 

The Indian government has honoured 10 artists — including five painters, two graphic artists and two sculptures — with the annual Lalit Kala Akademi's national awards (for the year 2014) for their "exemplary" works of art that reflect the new encounters in Indian aesthetics, the technical diversity and finesse in practise which Indian artists are known for. This is the 55th edition of the awards considered to be one of the most prestigious prizes in the domestic art world.
The prizes and an accompanying visual display (the National  Exhibition) recognise creativity in content, innovation of thought and mastery over practises of art in the contemporary segment.   
Art practises in India take in their stride 5,000 year old aesthetic lineage linked to the civilisational history and the universal global languages for a contemporary indigenous idiom that is more "glocal" than international. The Akademi looks for emerging artists whose works and perspectives of thought best represent these "ongoing currents" in Indian art.  
The theme of the national art awards for 2014 is "Of Challenges and Responses — Civilisation in Stress". 
Explaining the nature of selections, K.K. Chakravarty, the chairperson of the Lalit Kala Akademi, the country's national apex body of art, said a two-tier jury selected the 10 winners from submissions of thousands - invited by announcement in newspapers and the media from across urban, mofussil and rural habitats across India. Chakravarty said art in India had to connect to the settlement patterns and human lifestyles first; before "assimiliating from the east-west encounters across civilisations".
"It has to build bridges between the corporeal and the incorporeal, figurative and the non-figurative, to express the inexpressible and to communicate the sense of urgency to diagnose and cure radically fractured human condition. It reminds us that 'hidden worlds connect to things that hide them, within the red wood bark lies moss under which are roads and insects: Tide pools connect us to unfathomable seas which connect to our chromosomes," the chairman of the Lalit Kala Akademi (apex art institution) said. 
In a curatorial note, chairman Charavarty said "escape from the civilisational crisis has been sought in the fragmentation, reconstitution and objectification of organic and inorganic forms or to elusive, transient and uncertain mutations of visible reality". The 55th National Exhibition of the Lalit Kala Akademi and the awards "look at the world made by human beings in the eye and creates a spectrally heightened and distorted actuality, autonomous self-evolving structures, in tune with the transformative leavening power of nature. The exhibition tried to lend extraordinary meaning to ordinary objects by associating them in unforeseen permutations".   .     
The national award carries a purse of Rs 100,000. The categories include oil, acrylic, bronze, charcoal, etchings and ceramic art. 
The chairman of the Lalit Kala Akademi said "the awards in 2014 were significant because all the artists wanted their art works to be displayed in New Delhi. Earlier, the Akademi for nearly  last two decades had been carrying the ceremony and the exhibition to the states to "connect to a wider audience". One of the reasons that guided the Akademi's decision to "host the awards and visual showcase in Delhi was the fact that it would draw international attention and build a pool for the Akademi's Triennale exhibition in 2015 end by opening new dialogues. Moreover, the Kochi Biennale scheduled for Dec 2014 and the India Art Fair thereafter in early 2015 could use the Akademi's pool of talent for its curational exercises   — as a complimentary collation space.
"We want to pitch our talent at international events in the country and abroad as a platform and exchange forum. The prize is not an one-off engagement with young Indian art," the chairman of Lalit Kala Akademi said. 
The National Art Award Winners for 2014:  
Anamika Vijayaveeraraghavan 
Kaushik Halder 
Manoj Kumar Mohanty 
Mohammed Ayazuddin Patel 
Nongmaithem Nandaraj Singh 
Rajesh Kumar Singh 
Sanjeeva Rao Guthi 
Shrinivas Govindrao Mahetre 
Srinivas Reddy N 
Sumana Som    
                                                    

 -Madhusree Chatterjee 

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