This work belongs to a series of new media works (lenticular prints) that re-imagine historic landmarks and the cityscape of Mumbai. The reimagining is done by staging and presenting a virtual event that would impact and alter the viewer's  memory and recollection of the actual landmark. The staging of events is done using objects created in 3d  graphics and layered over a photograph using lenticular technology to give the illusion of three dimensional  space and depth. The attempt is to suggest or point out the fact that virtual experience could affect and alter the real. Here a  virtual event is enacted of sharks swimming across the skies and circling the monument as though in a feeding frenzy. 

‘Street-View’ paintings are essentially my engagement with the immediate reality of life in the city of Mumbai. This stream of works began around 2008-09 as an attempt to emulate Google street views from Google Earth, or snapshots of Earth conceived and visualized as accumulations of data. These paintings show random views of Mumbai streets obscured or defaced by an overlay of computer code graffiti. Eventually, these works transformed into my recollection of streets, highways, architectural landmarks, and inhabitants of Mumbai. These are high contrast detailed paintings done in acrylic on canvas, sparsely coloured and infused with a sense of alienation. These works present the city as a memory that is getting altered through the flow of information and passage of time. 

We live in an exciting time where new information questions the old structures. Smart devices with smart apps have given so much power to their users that within no time, one can have a strong opinion about anything and everything. Photo and video editing apps are used worldwide for various purposes including sabotaging political opponents and spreading false information. This is a result of the reading habit of books being replaced with reading social media posts. Today social media has turned everyone into a photographer and a writer of their own newspapers. Scrolling down pages and pages of social media, one can see a fascinating combination of a picture with text. In this series of works, I am trying to create some new link between familiar images and exciting texts through an informal style of calligraphy. To me, art is just not a display of skill of any sort; it is a way to look inside our own demons and then laugh over it.

Khalil Chishtee constructs life-size sculptures out of plastic bags. Much of his figurative work is evocative of movement and fluidity, and indeed, some of his work is sculpted in such a way to be constantly moving. Admittedly charmed by the vastness of the plastic bag medium, Chishtee enjoys the way it respectfully responds to his deepest emotions.

 "We live in the age of plastic, and plastic bags are the most ordinary form of this material. It goes back to the Sufi approach of my upbringing where worth does not depend on what you inherit, it depends on who you are. Anything made out of bronze, wood, stone or painted on a canvas carries the appearance of being worth looking at, because of its history, but if one can change the impact of that history, one is an artist." This ordinary product found everywhere around us expresses the best fast-paced lifestyle of our society: today’s trends are tomorrow’s trash.

Shivani’s works come from a process of continuously breaking herself to understand not just the world around her but the world within her.

 Her process is an emotional premonition of her own situation or condition. Over the past few years she has been involved with creating, enlarging, bending and twisting common everyday objects that she finds in her regular environment. Her art practice has evolved into a three-dimensional installation in wood, terracotta, fiberglass and thread. Her use of red thread in her previous body of works has been a significant emotion of her expression. They are symbolic of functionality, whether personal, political or societal, which are being constantly challenged.

SHIVANI AGGARWAL

Drawings

9 x 12.5 Inches Each 

Acrylic on Paper

2021-22