A brief introduction to the India Art Fair, New Delhi, The Dhaka Art Summit, and the Biennale in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

For eleven days of the contemporary art calendar South Asian generates into live; New Delhi, Dhaka, and most recently of all, Colombo, with its biennale, vie for our intellectual and acquisitional attention.

And with the close proximity of one event over another, it has become something of a cultural highlight of the new year. And this year appears to be no exception, as hundreds of thousands of visitors are marshalled into the art fair marquees, with the intention of seeing and acquiring modern and contemporary works of art.

Chris Dercon, Director Tate Modern and Dayanita Singhartist, artist, MyTemplArt Magazine

Chris Dercon, Director Tate Modern and Dayanita Singhartist, artist.

With over ninety exhibiting galleries disseminated across the carpeted tent, this year’s fair coincides with the opening of leading Indian artist, Subodh Gupta’s major survey show, Everything is Inside, at the National Museum of Modern Art; and the very recent confirmation of Mumbai artist Jitish Kallat being invited to take over the curatorial reigns for the next Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kerala, in December of 2014.

Though for all the furore and inflated interest, a gage of the faltering Indian market sees the definite absence of major international gallerists, such as Hauser&Wirth, (Switzerland), and Lisson Gallery, (London), who have their own vested interest in artists like Bharti Kher, Subodh Gupta, and the recent re-emergence of British sculptor Anish Kapoor. But then with the loss of certain institutions comes the emergence of more profitable relationships, as the geographical will of China’s art scene makes a first appearance this year, and the sponsoring of the event by Christie’s auction house, has introduced leading European and American works, to an Indian audience for the first time, as a measure of their interest in international art.

Yet significantly as a fall-out of the retracted market, and the lack of major sales this year, gallerists were employing new tactics that involved limited editions prints; that were available at the cost of an up-market supper.

L-R Neha Kirpal, Founder and Director, India Art Fair_ Rajiv Savara, art collector and Budi Tek,the Chinese - Indonesian enterpreneur, art collector and philanthropist, courtesy India Art Fair, 2014, MytemplArt Magazine

L-R Neha Kirpal, Founder and Director, India Art Fair_ Rajiv Savara, art collector and Budi Tek,the Chinese – Indonesian enterpreneur, art collector and philanthropist, courtesy India Art Fair, 2014

Dhaka’s art summit takes a completely different tact; defined as it is by its rigorous cultural and intellectual programme of events, (as opposed to the sales pitch that underpins the New Delhi Art Fair). Hosted by the Samdani Art Foundation, the two day event, encompasses a wealth of artists, institutions and curated experiments that positively swell into an incubator of activities. Whilst a little more detached, the Colombo Biennale, which has been absent from the international calendar since 2009, houses a more modest number of artists, from Sri Lanka and internationally, under the generative title ‘Becoming’.

And in a similar vein to the art summit in Dhaka, the curatorial team of Suresh Jayaram, (Bangalore), and Roman Berka, (Vienna), have facilitated a forum for an elastic discussion in Colombo. Drawing on a collective zeitgeist of social and cultural ‘uncertainty’, and ‘self-reflection’. Artists include Tori Wraanes, (Norway), Menika van der Poorten, Pala Pothupitiye, Pradeep Chandrasiri, of Sri Lanka, and Hanna Hollmann, Karl Karner, Hans Schabus and Linda Samaraweerová, from Austria. In a progressive attempt to introduce an international agenda to the national art scene there.

In it together.

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