the eight foundation
After a deeply personal, unabashedly raw, extremely satisfying first showing, a sophomore install, a second act, a part two is never an easy thing to conceive or execute. But of course we did so anyway. We’re excited to present this next book archiving the monumental showing at our building, Number 8 from April to October ‘22.
A lot has happened from the time that we started planning this install, until the time it was dismantled. Covid and its many waves elongated the time that the show lasted, but it decreased the windows of opportunities for friends and supporters to view it. What was the erstwhile Eight Collection advanced its mission and purpose, and transformed into The Eight Foundation, while retaining the aspect of a collection of purposeful and vital contemporary art at its core. The team has grown, as has the precision, intention and ambition of the Foundation. The
Eight Foundation has a mission to rethink engagement with contemporary art, imagining it to be more granular, focussed, immediate, relatable and intimate, all the while engaging with other contemporaneous art forms and conversations, and being a platform for multigeographical artistic cross-pollination.
We look back fondly at this production, for both its unique voice, narrative and aesthetic, and its role of being a time-stamp of what we believe to be a critical period in the evolution of The Eight Foundation.
Last but not the least, we would like to express our grateful acknowledgement to Meera Menezes, the curator of the show, and the team at Number 8 for making the second show a possibility.
Simran and Vir Kotak FoundersMunem Wasif’s Seeds shall set us free is a series of cyanotype prints of rice seeds that, at first glance, is reminiscent more of planetary systems and galaxies. The white marks on deep blue backgrounds could just as well be a smattering of stars across a firmament, a shooting meteor or the formation of celestial bodies. Wasif collapses the macrocosm with the microcosm, drawing attention to the seeds that, though infinitesimally small, have the potential to nourish and sustain mankind. In doing so he manages to transform the quotidian into something otherworldly.
Rice, a staple in Wasif’s homeland Bangladesh, is also connected with cultural traditions. The deity of harvest, Parvati, is a venerated figure, making the harvest festival Nabanna a cause for joy and celebration across the land. Even during marriage ceremonies, pounded rice is accorded a special place. But there are other undercurrents that lace the series. Wasif draws attention to the role that seeds play in the ecology of Bangladesh, where the different varieties of rice contribute to the country’s biodiversity and indigenous forms of knowledge. However, these are increasingly under threat from genetically modified seeds. The grains also reference the great Bengal famine of 1943, in which millions died of starvation because of the policies of the British colonial masters. By delving into the socioeconomic history of rice, Wasif makes a strong political statement about the exploitation prevalent in the agrarian sector.
How does architecture reflect the times we live in and how does it, in turn, transform over time? What gets eroded and what is resilient? What stories do these structures reveal to us and what still lies buried? These are some of the questions that artists grapple with as they observe their urban surroundings.
trace the contours of lived spaces, drawing attention to arcs and columns, while the walls remain conspicuously absent. By creating an immersive environment, he allows visitors physical entry into the artwork and enables them to experience his sculptural installations in a spatial manner.
Rathin Barman trains his gaze on the modern built environment to arrive at an understanding of its sociopolitical history. He is interested in what architectural forms tell us about ourselves and society. Of particular interest to him is the metamorphosis of the urban landscape as it responds to the arrival of people into the city over time. His works are suggestive of architectural drawings with their focus on linearity and precision. His materials
Sahil Ravindra Naik too interrogates architecture to arrive at an understanding of historical and sociopolitical developments. He is interested both in the project of nation-building as well as in minor narratives. His works are evacuated of people and it is the architecture that serves as a vehicle to articulate his preoccupations. In Modern Façades for New Nations I, he examines a nation’s modernist ambitions as expressed through its buildings.
The city and its built spaces increasingly serve as a muse to artists. Some of them are drawn to the metropolis’ grid-like nature with its interlocking roads, while others express their fascination for the lines and planes that are thrown up by the buildings that tower over them. Some seek refuge in the interiors of homes, focussing on the play of light and shadow within them, while others are taken by architectural ground plans that lay the foundations for these very structures.
The Greek-Armenian multi-disciplinary artist Hera Büyüktaşçyian’s oeuvre is grounded in historical research. In her work she investigates urban histories and memories, whether it is disappeared water ways or lost forests. By unearthing patterns of selected narratives in her drawings, she uncovers forgotten aspects of architectural memory, thereby rendering them visible. Ayesha Singh too trains her lens on urban histories but focuses on its more visible aspects such as the evolution of the built environment over time. For Chetnaa, New Delhi’s architecture has been a source of inspiration. She translates her careful observations of the city into a series of minimal, geometric abstractions, seeking symmetry and an order that is uniquely her own.
Revelling in a play of light and darkness is Nabil Rahman, as he explores the shadows thrown up by buildings. These often take on geometric shapes of their own accord and Rahman is invested in capturing them in his delicate sumi ink on paper paintings. Vishwa Shroff focusses her attention on neglected or overlooked areas of buildings such as corners, walls and even speckles on floors. In 2015, she started exploring transient spaces between buildings in London and then moved on to looking at “party walls”, short for partition walls, which can be observed in her London Partywall Series. In doing so, she opens up new ways of seeing and observing the world.
Material often acts as metaphor in the hands of artists. They make conscious choices in the materials they use to articulate the themes that preoccupy them. But often, their sheer exploration of the material also unearths new aspects and ideas. It is also through the texture and tactility of the material that artistic practitioners channel their thought processes. This give-and-take between the material and the artist is what makes the creative process particularly enriching.
Plastic, that much-maligned material, is Aaditi Joshi’s muse. Drawn to it for its sheer transparency and versatility, she uses it to construct myriad shapes. Many of her works are sculptural, orchestrating together hundreds of thin plastic bags to create large amorphous forms. She is also deeply interested in the material’s play with light, given plastic’s translucence. In contrast to Joshi’s colourful forms, Sachin George Sebastian’s works are largely monochromatic. He employs handcut paper and olefin sheets to create multi-
layered, complex structures, which possess a certain delicacy and fragility. While his works often reference the metropolis and the chaos within it, their multi-whorled appearance are reminiscent of floral forms.
Harendra Kushwaha also uses paper to fashion three-dimensional forms. He often cuts paper into strips and weaves them together producing creations that mimic the appearance of textile objects. In A Piece of Nothing, Some lines with Life and Time, the haptic and tactile nature of the medium is foregrounded.
The polished surface of Ayesha Sultana’s elliptical work, Eclipse II, both reflects and pulls the viewer into its inky black depths. The title also conjures up visions of the cosmos and the plunge into darkness that accompanies a solar eclipse. Surface also plays a role in Sitaram Swain’s archival print on boxes, We are Brown, with its extreme close ups of body parts, while making a statement on race and identity politics.
colour cadences
Abstract art is often seen as synonymous with non-objective and non-figurative art that abandoned any reference to the world outside of it, whether objects, figures or even anecdotes and literature. An abstract work of art focusses attention on its own formal features—to the organisation of colour, tone, line and light. In abstraction, aesthetic quality is given primacy over social and political relevance and the emphasis is on the autonomy of the aesthetic.
All the artists featured in this section are concerned with the evocative possibilities of colour and forms/formlessness. Srilamanthula Chandramohan eschews figuration and representational forms, exploring instead the alchemy of colours in his painting. In Rahul Inamdar’s oil on linen, colour seeps and bleeds, forming different colour gradients. Its dark elliptical core of blues fades into subtle tones of salmon and pinks. Shades of blue also mark Manisha Parekh’s curving forms, which form convoluted, twisted shapes in the centre of her ink and watercolour Relic 1. Black rears its head in Jeram Patel’s untitled painting. Enshrined in the centre, nebulous forms float on white surfaces, in a play of negative and positive spaces.
Parul Gupta’s quest for depth and threedimensionality has led to the creation of a series of sculptural works that employ industrial paint on angular aluminium shapes. She engineers a radical shift in perception by the clever use of matt and glossy paint. This shift in perception is also evident in French painter and sculptor Beatrice Bissara’s hypnotic circles of colour, magnetically drawing viewers into their very depths.
writing histories
“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” ― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Britain and liberate India. Mohaiemen unpacks his discovery of Ali’s problematic stance in a series of typed pages paired with extreme closeups from the Bengali book.
How is memory constructed and history written?
All that we witness is not necessarily all that we remember. The processes of memory retrieval are complex and, while we retain some things, we consciously or unconsciously purge others.
Histories too are constantly being written and revised as different lenses are used to interpret the past.
Some artists dredge memories and build visual narratives around them, while others dip into the archive to create new meaning from past histories. Naeem Mohaiemen, in Volume Eleven (A Flaw in the Algorithm of Cosmopolitanism) for instance, looks at four essays by the Bengali author Syed Mujtaba Ali, written between the two World Wars. In them, Ali erroneously predicted that the German army would defeat
In his black and white photograph, William Dalrymple takes us to Afghanistan, where a bunch of children are seen playing in front of the niches of the Bamiyan Buddhas. The Taliban had tried to erase parts of Afghanistan’s cultural history by blowing up the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001.
Saubiya Chasmawala and Arshi Irshad
Ahmadzai both use the written language in different forms to evoke stories and memories. By combining faint text and image, Chasmawala creates a narrative that appears to come to us through the filters of time, some of it legible and some of it obscure. Conversely, Ahmadzai boldly articulates the stories of women, which often go unheard, by marrying together fabric and text.
Artists often harness the power of written scripts in a variety of ways to create their visual vocabulary. Language is used to recount stories as well as subverted to generate new meanings. In the process of writing, re-writing and erasure, different ways of seeing and interpreting are opened up.
Text and textile are married together in Rakhi Peswani and Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai’s works. In her installation, Peswani uses the power of words to fire the imagination of the viewer. In many of her delicate, minimal pieces of fabric, she juxtaposes embroidered words in opposition to each other such as “blunt” and “sharpness” or “hollow” and “mass.” Other pairings are more poetic such as “loaded” with “silence” or “lingering” with “unknown.”
Ahmadzai translates her passion for poetry onto Manjarpat fabric using flower dye, Fuller’s Earth and ink. Her notations are only legible to those who understand the language she uses. To others, they might appear more as decorative, calligraphic flourishes.
Saubiya Chasmawala creates her poetic works using visual texts and scriptures. She delves into the recesses of her memory to come up with stories or symbols, which she then transfers onto paper. By a process of inscribing and erasure, she creates a palimpsest of narratives, meanings and textures.
For Youdhisthir Maharjan, found texts are the material of choice. He looks for books with interesting titles and those that embody feeling. Some of his sources of inspiration are Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Albert Camus and Buddhist thangka paintings. He cuts, distorts and erases texts in a methodical and algorithmic manner. Though the process might be repetitive and laborious, Maharjan finds it calming and meditative.
SAUBIYA C h ASMAWALA Untitled, 2017 4 Ink, graphite, thread and needle on handmade paper made out of cotton 8.5 x 11 in.
SAUBIYA C h ASMAWALA Untitled, 2011 5 Gouache, charcoal and incisions on paper 7.25 x 13 in.
drawing boundaries
While boundaries define the territories of nations and states, they often also are contested sites. Serving as markers of both inclusion and exclusion, they box in people of similar linguistic, cultural and ethnic groupings, while keeping out others. Transgressions of the borders are common as countries seek to consolidate their territorial holdings or expand their sphere of influence. These imaginary and intangible lines are sometimes even arbitrary, leading to decades of strife and skirmishes that result in the loss of homelands, migration of peoples and refugee crises. Fencing of these boundaries with concertina coils, stringent checkpoints and border posts are some of the ways in which nation states seek to control the flow of goods and people through them. Artists have been especially sensitive to territorial markings and the human cost associated with them. They have also been sensitive to the exclusionary tactics practised by states and other entities.
Pakistani artist Bani Abidi trains her gaze on other means of control and exclusion. In her works she has often pointed out that Pakistan’s alliance with the US in its “war on terror” has not been without repercussions, as is evident
in the heightened security measures in the country’s cities. In her suite of 6 works titled Flailing Barriers Abidi holds up the various forms of barriers and checkpoints for scrutiny. By removing these objects from their normal surroundings, she emphasises their formal characteristics, such as structure and colour. A border of a different kind can be seen in Jasmine Nilani Joseph’s work. The empty, negative space throws into sharp relief the row of vegetation and built structures that straddle the artwork horizontally.
Shilpa Gupta has been preoccupied with the plight of people whose lives undergo dramatic changes by the arbitrary redrawing of national borders. She has often highlighted the Indian and Bangladeshi enclaves left behind in each other’s countries after the subcontinent’s independence from Britain. But equally, she trains her gaze on the sky to emphasise the lack of boundaries there and the freedom that clouds have to float at will, as is evident in There is no Border Here Arpita Singh’s works Leaping Bridge and Desert Wall gesture towards the presence of borders. In the former, the words “Your Land” and “My Land” point to territorial ambitions, the root cause of conflict.
BANI ABIDI Flailing Barriers (set of 6), 2016
In 1919, the artist Vasily Kandinsky in his essay On Line wrote, “From these two graphic entities—point and line—derive the entire resources of a whole realm of art, graphics.”
The possibilities of line have fascinated artists over the ages. While some use it to create representational worlds, others are interested in its more abstract dimensions.
Several artists concern themselves with the city and the lines they spy there. Ayesha Singh keenly observes her surroundings and its evolving built architecture, which mirror historical and socio-political developments. Her line sculptures are a reflection of these architectural shifts and amalgamations. Similarly, Rathin Barman’s Waiting for more than 5 decades, with its lines demarcating localities, reflects his preoccupation with urbanscapes and how the city and its built environment transforms with the influx of people. Barman, who lives in Kolkata, has been engaging with the architecture, history and memory of its inhabitants, especially the owners of large, palatial houses.
In Vir Kotak’s photographic works, the lines that he observes in the material world are sublimated into shafts of light. Architectural structures lose their solidity and appear to float almost ethereally. Ayesha Sultana’s bluetinged tunnel series focus the attention on the meshwork of lines—straight, criss-crossing or diagonal—in architectural structures, reminiscent of tunnels and railway stations.
Contour lines mark Remen Chopra W. Van Der Vaart’s large-scale undulating landscape, its terracotta hues evocative of the plan of an ancient city. Chopra is known for layering her works, creating palimpsests in the process. She often starts with real maps and then transforms them into imagined typographies. In this installation, she layers recycled reddish wood fibre sheets, the colour suggestive of the earth and its maternal aspects. Equally, the layers appear like accretions of sediments, space and time. Gulammohammed Sheikh presents an aerial view of a landscape in his paper-mâché relief mounted on ply board Land - 2, in which lines are suggestive of roads connecting cities and civilisations. Sheikh has long been engaged with maps and mapping that, according to him, allow viewers different points of entry and exit into the work. This also opens up the possibilities for them to take multiple journeys.
Afra Al Dhaheri grew up in Abu Dhabi and her work is reflective of the rapid transformations that have taken place in the city and in the UAE at large. However, these works are reminiscent more of household interiors, where lines serve to draw attention to certain spaces such as corners of rooms. Astha Butail, on the other hand, is preoccupied with memory, oral traditions and their role in the transmission of cultural values. Her A first short vowel inherent in consonants is a visual interpretation of these concerns.
Lines, as is evident, open up a plethora of possibilities for these artists, each of whom has used them in their own distinctive way to conjure up myriad worlds.
Krishna Reddy was a master printmaker and sculptor whose pioneering technique of simultaneous multicolour viscosity printing left a mark world-wide. Born in 1925 in the Nanadanoor village of Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh, he passed away on August 22, 2018 in New York.
Reddy attended the Rishi Valley school, founded by the philosopher and spiritual leader Jiddu Krishnamurti, before moving on to studying art amidst the pastoral environs of Santiniketan. In contrast to the British academic system, classes here were not rote-based and largely conducted outdoors. He was mentored by artists Nandalal Bose and Ramkinkar Baij. Apart from painting and sculpture, Reddy also studied botany and biology, the influences of which can be observed in many of his prints done later in life, such as Water Lilies, Radiating Flowers or Blossom In Fleur, as in several other artworks, the patterns are suggestive of enlarged tissue cells as seen under a microscope. Clearly, nature and its various forms would remain a chief source of inspiration for him, as is evident in works that bear titles such as Insect or Fish
Thanks to Krishnamurti, Reddy travelled to London and studied art at The Slade School of Fine Art, where he was an apprentice with sculptor Henry Moore. He moved to Paris in the early 1950s, which resulted in a major shift in his art. Here, he joined Atelier 17, a printmaking workshop founded by the British surrealist painter and printmaker Stanley William Hayter. Reddy applied his knowledge of sculpture to printmaking, creating relief sculptures on metal plates. In collaboration with Hayter, he then went on to develop the technique of
simultaneous multicolour viscosity printing, in which coloured inks of different viscosities produce complex images from a single plate. He was particularly overjoyed at the possibility of selectively depositing surface colours and intaglio simultaneously on the same plate and printing it at one go. This resulted in prints with a terrific graphic quality coupled with directness and immediacy.
Atelier 17 was also where the paths of the two greatest Indian printmakers crossed—Krishna Reddy and Zarina Hashmi. Zarina also studied viscosity printing at the atelier and shared a life-long friendship with Reddy and his family.
Once, calling him her ‘teacher’, Zarina fondly said, “If I had never looked at Krishna’s work, I would never have known what printmaking is all about.”
The evidence of Reddy’s pioneering achievement with multicolour viscosity can be viewed in his Great Clown series. In 1976, Reddy moved from Paris to the United States. He apparently took his daughter to the circus in New York in 1978 and was drawn to the
funny/tragic figure of the joker. Over the next two decades, clowns appeared often as the protagonists of his works. In the clown series, a bouquet of paints—each mixed with linseed oil to a different thickness so that they did not run into each other—was applied separately to the same metal etching plate. This resulted in brilliant bursts of colour, each print unique in itself.
Reddy’s works straddled the spectrum between abstraction and figuration, many of his prints bordering on the semi-abstract. While Woman of Sunflower is figurative in nature, Seed Pushing or Woman & her Parting Sons is not. One of the distinctive features of Reddy’s works is his use of radiating lines, which impart a tremendous sense of movement to his works. Some of his prints such as Whirlpool or Splash are evocative of the force and majesty of water, while in others, notably Three Figures and Flight, there is a hum and energy that emanates from his prints— an energy that Reddy brought to bear all his life in any medium he worked in, whether printmaking or sculpture.
KRIS h NA R e DDY Clown and the Flying Swans 2 Multicolour viscosity print on paper 16.6 x 21.2 in.
KRIS h NA R e DDY Clown Forming 3 Multicolour viscosity print on paper 16.6 x 21.2 in.
