THE WHY NOT PLACE
New Delhi – 2010 :
While Delhi was trying to upgrade for the Commonwealth Games (2010), Sumakshi Singh was drawing up a residency program to bring together artists to come and draw from the city.
Singh organised an art residency for Religare arts.initiative, which held only two iterations. The first in 2010, was curated by Singh, with Paola Cabal, and was titled ‘THE TRANSFORMING STATE’. The participating artists included Purnna Behera , Brad Biancardi, Garima Jayadevan, Kavita Singh Kale, Megha Katyal, Nidhi Khurana, Jitesh Malik, Rajesh Kumar Prasad, Vishwa Shroff, Onishi Yasuaki among others.
The second iteration (2011) was titled, ‘HERE NOW THEN THERE and HERE again’, and curated by Singh alone. The participating artists included Gustavo Villegas Solis, Kaoru Furuko, Kartik Sood, Kundo Yumnam, Manali Shroff, Rajorshi Ghosh, Rathin Barman, Soghra Khurasani among others.
The residency was intended as a process studio that enables each artist to further their own conceptual and aesthetic sensibilities within a broad thematic framework suggested by a mentor. Based on their own independent interests and practices, resident artists were asked to process, critique and digest their impressions of the external and internal landscape in very open ended ways (including optional exercises, dialogues, slideshows, field trips, critiques and studio visits). The work produced in this intense period is being exhibited for a month at Religare arts.initiative space in Central Delhi. The artists were given lodging, and local transport support, with the whole city being a studio space
Religare decided to discontinue the residency program after the second iteration for administrative and strategic reasons.
Text Courtesy : Space118
Image Courtesy : Sumakshi Singh