New Delhi, August 06: The School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, a curiously unpretentious space for young artists, often throws up interesting works on its dull walls. This time, a 24-year-old Australian, Alana Hunt, has brought together 27 artists from India and the Down Under to present a panoply of works, from photographs of Delhi nights to installations relaying noises of Delhi streets to a Kashmir diary on the wall.
The title of the exhibition is incongruously long — “Someone draws a flower on a wall beside a bed: An act, an image, a possibility…” — and has 40 works. A mural by Iram Ghufran is splashed on the wall outside the school. A playful intervention in the university space, it uses the image of a typist from an old matchbox.
Meanwhile, Ingrid Dernee’s Love Gesture has small cards with the image of a heart dominating the staircase. Sleepless Nights by Dhruba Dutta shows the nocturnal side of Delhi: one black-and-white photograph shows eunuchs caught in a feverish dance, while another depicts a man sleeping on the pavement. Test Flight is an impish work done by Sydney-based Andrew Robards and Anna Williams.
A semi-performance photographic work, it shows, in four images, the two artists making a giant plane, folding it and then taking flight. Hunt’s work If Only shows diary notes from her two weeks’ stay in Kupwara, Uri and Srinagar.
Her Kashmir experiences have turned into a text on the wall, which also gets covered with local newspapers such as Rising Kashmir, Kashmir Horizon and Urdu journals.
Unlike the plush galleries where guest assemble to decipher art over wine and hors d’oeuvres, the university had TVs mounted on bricks and newspaper stacks that worked as seats for watching videos.
The exhibition is on till August 20
–Agencies