(Left to Right) Gaurav Ogle, Mira Felicia Malhotra and Varun Desai | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
India Art Fair returns to New Delhi’s NSIC Grounds, Okhla with one of the biggest annual art events of the country, packed with artistic activities exploring new dimensions of identity, culture and existence as it journeys into the digital realm Is. FAIR’s first-ever Digital Artists in Residence program fosters the enduring romance between art and technology in India.
Testing the waters, the fair last year put out an open call for events under the theme ‘Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary’. It received an overwhelming response, with “over 200 applications”, as press coordinator Goutami Reddy says. Of these, only three technical artists – Gaurav Ogle, Meera Felicia Malhotra and Varun Desai – have made it to the digital residency hub of the fair. Artists will showcase immersive digital projects and installations created on the iPad, engaging with the audience in workshops and sessions presented by Today at Apple, the culture and creative programs wing of Apple.
“Since the pandemic, we have seen an explosion in conversation around NFTs and tech-inspired art,” says fair director Jaya Asokan. She adds that a Tech X Art pavilion named The Studio will also showcase film and video artworks by more than 15 artists, including Payal Arya, Aditi Kulkarni, Julien Segard and Shrimanta Saha, supported by the Gujral Foundation, Serendipity Arts Foundation and Foundation for Indian . Contemporary Art (FICA) is progressively pushing the boundaries of each creativity.
Three’s Company: The Faire’s first resident digital artist
3D View: Varun Desai
Varun Desai’s artwork: Highway, 2020, a digital illustration | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
“We are progressing into a new digital reality,” says Varun Desai, an artist who works in a range of mediums from electronic music production and engineering to creative coding and installation art. “I use code like a paintbrush using a paintbrush as my primary tool,” he says. There is a way of his creative process. He’s working with a number of applications specifically designed for the iPad — from sound recording to sketching and 3D scanning via the LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensor on the iPad Pro — he’s looking to capture images of space rather than flat photos. Captures and generates 3D scans.
woman in frame
Digital raster by Mira Felicia Malhotra | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
As far as visual artist and illustrator Mira Felicia Malhotra is concerned, women take center stage. Her neon-tinted pop art works, titled What will People Say, a radical deviation from society’s stereotypical notion of ideal women. She says, “I want to show more women as bodybuilders, as space explorers, as angry women or even as bad women — women making space in ways that we usually don’t.” I think it comes from my own fantasies in me, the desire to be able to live life in many ways.
tripping on nostalgia
Artwork by Gaurav Ogle, Fugdi _ FUGDI, 2021, Acrylic and gold foil on paper, frame by frame hand drawn animation | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Weaving memories, artist, poet and author Gaurav Ogle brings to life extraordinary biographies of ordinary people through an audio-visual book anthology series ‘Bestsellers’. He creates short animated films that act like portals to another time and place. With no fixed studio space, Gaurav carves out a corner for himself, be it at home, a friend’s kitchen or a residency in Goa or rural France. “I carry objects that allow me to think and create,” he says, “not only devices like my iPad Pro, on which I take to write and draw, but also more sentimental objects.” that impresses me.” He shows us some of these items – a leather-bound notebook from his school days, a porcelain bookmark collected in Marrakesh during a residency, and a small bottle of perfume, a gift from his father.
By 12 February.
A glimpse of them before the biggest events and festivals of the country take place. So, you want to travel more? watch this space.