Date/Time
Date(s) - 22/09/2017
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Location
Alliance Française du Bengale
Categories
INDO-EUROPEAN RESIDENCY PROJECT KOLKATA
Alliance Française du Bengale, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata, CIMA Gallery and Visva Bharati, Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan initiate an artists’ residency in Kolkata.
In the framework of the Franco-German Elysée Fonds, Alliance Française du Bengale, the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata, the Kolkata based gallery CIMA and Visva Bharati, Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan are organizing the interdisciplinary Indo – European Residency Project Kolkata. The residency takes place in Kolkata and in Santiniketan, West Bengal, India and lasts seven weeks, six weeks in Kolkata and one week in Santiniketan.
For the Indo-European Residency Project Kolkata, three artists practicing different art forms (one from Germany, France and India) will work and explore the city together for six weeks in Kolkata and one week in Santiniketan. During their stay, the artists will meet for a productive exchange with a variety of people from all walks of life in West Bengal.
The aim of this residency is not necessarily the creation of an individual or collective work of art during the stay in India, but the focus is on the enrichment of personal, artistic experiences in contact with Indian artists and the exchange with the fellow-residents about how a new culture space is discovered. Furthermore, it is desirable to think about a creation, which might arise during the residency or after.
Participating Resident Artists from France, Germany and India
Laurent Reyes (Lyon, France)
What is the tension between the act and the situation of travelling and of living? To which extend observing from a distance and experimenting is contradictory? Can intellectual views and emotions or sensations can always be reconciled? Do creating at home and creating abroad mobilise the same energy and lead to similar results?
Such an overwhelming city as Kolkata has the power to bring up these questions to their fullest. By accepting and exploring the possible contradictions contained within each participant of the residency and between them, Laurent wants to install a creative dialogue that enhances the comprehension of oneself as much as of the alterity.
Defining a common language is the necessary condition to provide access to such a conversation. Thus, the grammar and the vocabulary of this language has to be imagined together, in a participatory and inclusive manner.
Laurent Reyes considers the artistic media as a tool to experiment life, as an interface to discover and meet his environment. Using photography, sound recording or video, his work focuses on the « the other » to understand him and himself. The result achieved shows his search for the right distance between him and the « captured » subject. He also works often in collaboration, codirecting films, participating in collective projects (periodicals, collective exhibitions and performances) or getting his entourage involved in his projects. He works in the Lamartine artistique site in Lyon, where collaboration between the artists is the pillar that supports the collective entity. He also animate workshops in social centers and teaches in cinema schools.
Ida Roscher (Hamburg, Germany)
Ida Roscher will work towards developing strategies for examining social relations in an intercultural environment. She can imagine to work with the situation of living with the other residents by documenting relations of different cultures, e.g. between image and practice, or between producing and using art as well as the moments of conflict between “arts”, “politics”, and “the everyday”. She would also like to capture the process of social relations in terms of the idea of working and living together.
She has studied art and criminological social research. She is interested in societal forms and norms and the questions of common actions/operations in times of individualism. Using different formats (sculpture but also performance and installation), her examination of chancing societal structures tries to fathom their interdependency and where and how they get noticeable. She also works in the collaboration model COPS (Corporation Of People’s Situations) & ES.
Furthermore she has gained experience in making interventions in urban spaces during international art projects and summer schools.
Harendra Kumar Kushwaha (Kolkata, India)
With full respect in the conventional modes of painting, he initially started working with various mediums like acrylic, oil, pastel, mixed media and watercolours. While these set of mediums presented their own lure and pictorial possibilities what ultimately stuck to him is the notion of “making” rather than a finished object. This reliance on the idea of “process”, the unfinished and the “continuous” led him to explore the elastic possibilities of various materials, like fabric (especially denims), paper strips etc. among a host of others. These trysts with the material led him to explore various skill set and processes like weaving and stitching often fabricating them over pre-existing found objects replicating it in its dimensional modalities and facets.
These activities ultimately stretched the torsion flexibility of these materials leading to the formation of various structural composites.
Events around the Residency
22 September 2017, 6:30 pm
Alliance Française du Bengale
Park Mansions, Gate 3
57A Park Street
Kolkata 700016
MEET THE ARTISTS:
Presentation by the three resident artists from Germany, France and India about their respective objectives and their work. This will be followed by a question and answer session.
Light refreshments will be served
Open to All.
