‘Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials.’
-Anni Albers
‘Material Metaphor’, curated by Aranya Bhowmik for Astanzi, listens to the conversations between twelve contemporary artists and their preferred mediums as they boldly and passionately embrace the material of their choice, negating the derogatory status of craft or ‘low art’. The featured artists are engaged in exploring the possibilities of a massive range of materials from organic handmade paper, paper pulp jute, leather, textile, clay, and charcoal to factory-made products such as staple pin, cigarette foil, cement and so on. Transcending their feminine identities Dinar Sultana, Ekta Singha, Kshitija Bhamre, Mansi Trivedi, Piyali Sadhukhan, Pooja Iranna, Promiti Hossain, Puja Mondal, Rakhi Peswani, Sadhana Naskar, Sadhvi Jawa, and Sharmistha Kar, twelve distinct voices of this virtual show, address the personal as well as the socio political and Environmental Concerns of our time.
The curatorial frame of the show is noteworthy for it focuses on the historicity and the politics attached to certain materials. The curator’s note states, “There is a cartographic endeavour in this curation and in articulating and observing the time and its resonance through material identified in individual artistic language with varied perception by women from different registers.”
Started on March 15, 2021 the exhibition is currently on view on Astanzi’s website https://astanzi.com/
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