Silent Beats

Volte exists to provide a platform for non traditional art and culture in Mumbai. We see ourselves as a node, a gathering point to promote ideas and conversations between artists, technologists, activists, writers, intellectuals and the community at large. We will house an exhibition space, a curated bookshop, artist residencies/studios, a cafe, a film club and a platform for public art.

Volte is a radical shift from the traditional gallery model, where the exhibitions, events and audience intermingle in a dynamic and exciting program. While we promote all media of contemporary art, we are interested in advocating and exhibiting projects which blur the lines between the arts, sciences, spirituality and life itself.

Tushar Jiwarajka

Founder and Director

info@volte.in

Volte

Titled: Water Tragedy: Climate Refugee of Bangladesh. This series,  and the show from Paris will be on display here in London at Purdy Hicks gallery in October. The images are extremely powerful in their own right, are beautifully shot and remind me of Salgado’s work who naturally, has been one of my inspirations.
Take a look here

http://www.prixpictet.com/artists/view/168

“Iran Inside Out,” at the Chelsea Art Museum (556 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, 212-255-0719, chelseaartmuseum.org) through Sept. 5

The image above is from the third Iranian art exhibition I have read about in the span of a week.  Last week also debuted two Iranian shows, back to back: The first being ‘Made in Iran‘ co-organised by Arianne Levene, showcasing at Asia House followed by ‘In a different light‘ which opened at Osbourne Samuel Gallery in Mayfair. Both shows have some powerful pieces, which depict a certain specific cultural heritage. Indian art on the contrary for example, deals in myopinion with more universal themes, and are not as directly patriotic. The works I have seen, seem to me to show a sense of liberation or attempt at breaking free from a past. The history of Iran is in itself unique, as is it’s current political situation. These artists find themselves producing work within this environment, and this does eventually show through, however I do feel as though the prime root behind the work is that they want at the end of it all to educate; to make those outside of their home country aware, of it’s strengths, it’s weaknesses, its power, its spirituality and most of all it’s essence.

Dakhil (Image 1), 2003
Installation
Green fluorescent lamps, plexiglass & glass thread.
200.0 x 200.0 x 200.0 cm (78¾ x 78¾ x 78¾ inches)

As you walk through the exhibition, you feel as though you are walking through time, through discovery and the emergence of light through the work, reminds you of how inquisitive our minds are and most of all how little it is we know.  Infinitum literally translated can be defined as infinite, however the curators of the show have put in a hyphen in the middle of the word, to break it apart providing it with a new found double meaning, finite in the infinite. It is the quest for the limit, in a limitless world, the nothing but the everything. It is a spiritual quest, one which pushes our boundaries, and natural frames of thought.

We see this through the exceptional video piece by Bill Viola, the photographs of Sugimoto and the minimalist yet striking paintings by Miro. We see traces of drawings, artifacts, collections, constructions all yearning, searching and wanting to stretch and explore. Fantastic to see such  works, which are so simple at first glance, but have deep and thought out meaning behind them.

Artists

In-finitum will present works by Giovanni Anselmo, Natvar Bhavsar, Pierre Bonnard, Berlinde de Bruyckere, Michael Borremans, Alberto Burri, Alexander Calder, Paul Cézanne, Antonio Canova, Eugène Delacroix, Ray & Charles Eames, Lucio Fontana, Adam Fuss, Giuseppe Gabellone, Francesco Hayez, Ann-Veronica Janssens, Anish Kapoor, Anselm Kiefer, Kimsooja, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Brice Marden, Fausto Melotti, Mario Merz, Joan Mirò, Tatsuo Miyajima, Vic Muniz, Renato Nicolodi, Roman Opalka, Palagio Pelagi, Pablo Picasso, Otto Piene, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Guido Reni, Gerhard Richter, George Romney, Thomas Ruff, Kazuo Shiraga, Ettore Spaletti, Vassilikis Takis, Diana Thater, Dirk Van De Len, Jef Verheyen, Rik Wouters, Gilberto Zorio … and many others.

The art of drawing – is an act of demarcation, when and where a space-time continuum splits white from white, celebrating union and division. The aesthetic judgement does not discriminate between joy and anguish, between pleasure and pain, both are areas of experience. The artist stops watching and begins observing. Observing is sighting with a pre-established programme. A choice is exercised between the included and the excluded. However, both particitpate in defining the face of the visible. The two aspects enter into dialogue – interpenetrating spaces, trangressing boundaries, violating a symphony of shared commonality. The image is an embodiment, an act of nomenclature. The artist may reproduce what he has seen; he may represent what he observed, he may project a mental configuration. His culture, his concept of order, his imagination, will transform these into a state of ‘otherness’. The momentum which drives him to start is causeless or if there is a reason, it is trivial – the big moments of history are recorded by small talents. If the bombing of a village produced Guernica, the entire World War was consecrated to painting still lifes with tomato plants and pots and pans. “The apple can be as revolutionary as a gun.” Experience in general and visual experience in particular are prior conditions without which no expression through plastic means is possible. Not a sudden spurt of inspiration, but a kind rhythmic breathing over periods of time, a sinking inwards, a state of absorption, when the uttermost point of sensibility, endowed with the gift, both of gratification and second sight, reveals and conceals the flight of textures, planes, tonalities, colours. The performer lives at split-levels – both doer and watcher, horse and rider, the functions fused, boundaries merged, an interlocking of bodies, many and one. Someone who has the sensibility to enjoy looking at a work of art knows the intense power the work conveys. The sense-data that the eyes communicate to the mind, when deciphering the works in a book, these same eyes become illiterate, looking at a painting. The language systems are different. It is a veritable Tower of Babel. The infinite distance, between sound waves and the colour spectrum is the true distance between eyes and ears. It is their proximity which is an illusion.

Akbar Padamsee.

(Excerpt from ‘Akbar Padamsee – Works on Paper – Critical Boundaries, published by Pundole Art Gallery , 2004)

The Progressive artists group, founded in 1947, fought against political and social contradictions they faced before independence and this was seen clearly through their art. At that stage the artists were focused on defining their identity once British rule ended and tried hard to escape from a struggled past; Now, with globalisation, migration, and hyper-technology artists are having to re-establish their identity in an ‘altermodern’ world, defined by Nicholas Bourriaud as a new modernity which is emerging.

The selected artists in this show, display works ranging over a span of 62 years. It showcases the Indian artist who was trying to break free from the anguish and despair of the past, to the artist who is now struggling to keep up with the rapid pace in which its’ country is now moving forward. It was the Progressives, who helped newer talent to emerge and the current artists do in some way owe their expression of talent to many of the earlier artists from the past.

It is an interesting exhibition; a visual voyage through a passage of history in the world of Indian art – displaying how it has changed over the years, and most importantly how it is breaking waves for its’ future.

Vinita Agarwal

“Artists are looking for a new modernity that would be based on translation: What matters today is to translate the cultural values of cultural groups and to connect them to the world network. This “reloading process” of modernism according to the twenty-first-century issues could be called altermodernism, a movement connected to the creolisation of cultures and the fight for autonomy, but also the possibility of producing singularities in a more and more standardized world.” Nicholas Bourriaud

The show is on from the 7th of May till the 29th of May – and is located at 21 Ryder Street, SW1Y 6PX

Taryn Simon (b. 1975 in New York) assumes for her project “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” the dual role of shrewd informant and collector of curiosities, compiling an inventory of what lies hidden and out-of-view within the borders of the United States. She examines a culture through careful documentation of diverse subjects from the realms of science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature, security and religion. Through text and image, the work underscores the complicated relationship between a photograph and its context. The visual is processed aesthetically and then re-defined by its text. Her sometimes ethereal, sometimes foreboding compositions, shot over a four year period, vary as much as her subject matter, which ranges from radioactive capsules at a nuclear waste storage facility to a black bear in hibernation. In examining that which is integral to America’s foundation, mythology and daily functioning, Simon creates a collection of works that reflect and reveal a national identity.