Events

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9, 11 AM - 9 PM

SAMIT DAS OPEN STUDIO

Samit Das opens the door of his studio to share the out­­come of his research and the works pro­­duced during his res­i­­dency in Paris with the Pernod Ricard Fellowship. He will also pre­sent new draw­ings inspired by the Indus civ­i­liza­tion and its his­tory to link them to a new archae­ology: the one that draws the pas­sage of Indian artists in Paris, as part of his exhi­bi­tion Punascha Parry (On view at Villa Vassilieff until December, 23rd).

Atelier Pernod Ricard: Back end of the alley, green door, first floor.
Entrance free of charge.

Silmituanously, from 11 am to 1 pm
India-France: Artistic Exchanges. The launch of the new issue of the journal "Marg".
Roundtable at Villa Vassilieff

Coordinated by Devika Singh (Global Art Prospective, INHA / Center of South Asian Studies, Cambridge University).
With: Samit Das (artist, art his­to­rian, Pernod Ricard Fellow 2017), Pascal Monteil (artist), Raïssa Padamsee (art his­to­rian) & Laurent Brégeat (film­maker), Maël Renouard (writer and French trans­lator).

This roundtable will give the floor to the con­trib­u­tors of the new issue of the Indian magazine "Marg", edited by Devika Singh on the sub­ject of artistic exchanges between France and India. It will revisit the his­tory of these encoun­ters, the resulting art­works and the ques­tion of the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the other that haunts the artistic approaches of India. 
Artist Samit Das, art his­to­rian Raissa Padamsee (daughter of the artist Akbar Padamsee) and the film­maker Laurent Brégeat will also take part, wit­nesses each in their own way of a new global approach to mod­ernism, nour­ished by sub­jec­tive nar­ra­tives and pecu­liar meet­ings.

Conversations will be alter­nately in French and in English.

Tea and coffee will be offered to vis­i­tors of the exhi­bi­tion.

BIOGRAPHIES OF CONTRIBUTORS:

Samit Das(1970, Jamshedpur, India) studied fine arts at the Santiniketan Kala Bhavan before attending a post Experience pro­­gram at Camberwell College of Arts in London through a British Council Scholarship. As an artist, he spe­­cial­izes in painting, pho­­tog­­raphy, inter­ac­­tive art­­works, artists’ books as well as in cre­ating multi-sen­­sory envi­ron­­ments through art and archi­tec­­tural instal­la­­tions. He also has a deep interest in archives and doc­u­­men­­ta­­tion.

Samit Das had sev­eral solo shows as well as group shows in India and abroad. He was notably part of the Dakar Biennale, Senegal. He has doc­u­­mented the Tagore house Museum In Kolkata (1999-2001). Samit Das started his research on Santiniketan Architecture during his MFA studies, which resulted in a book titled Architecture of Santiniketan: Tagore’s con­­cepts of space (Niyogy Books, Delhi). He has curated a few his­­tory-based exhi­bi­­tions like The Idea of space and Rabindranath Tagore and Resonance of Swami Vivekananda and Art of Nandalal Bose. He was awarded a BRIC schol­ar­­ship to visit Italy. His artist’s book, Hotel New Bengal, was released in 2009 (Onestar Press, France). He was recently awarded a Research schol­ar­­ship from ProHelvetia New Delhi to visit Switzerland.

Pascal Monteil is a French artist who divides his time between France and Asia.
He worked with Christian Lacroix on the play La Forêt des coeurs som­bres (Centre des
arts, Enghien-les-Bains, 2003) where Lacroix was cos­tume designer and Monteil set designer. Another one of their col­lab­o­ra­tions was the exhi­bi­tion Carte Blanche
à Christian Lacroix (Musée Cognac-Jay, Paris, 2014). Monteil has also show­cased his works at the National Museum, New Delhi in 2013.

Maël Renouard is a philoso­pher and writer. He has taught at the University of Sorbonne and at École Normale Supérieure. In 2013, he was awarded the Prix Décembre for his first work of fic­tion, La Réforme de l’opéra de Pékin (The Reform of Beijing Opera). In 2016, he pub­lished a lit­erary non-fic­tion book about the internet, Fragments d’une mémoire infinie (Fragments of an Infinite Memory).

Devika Singh is an art his­to­rian who spe­cialises in modern and con­tem­po­rary Indian art and archi­tec­ture. She is an affil­i­ated scholar at the Centre of South Asian Studies of the University of Cambridge and a member of the Global Art Prospective at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA) and holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. She was pre­vi­ously the Smuts research fellow at Cambridge. She is cur­rently writing a book on artistic prac­tices in post-inde­pen­dence India for Reaktion Books and has con­tributed to many art magazines and exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logues as well as to the jour­nals Modern Asian Studies, Art History, Third Text and the Journal of Art Historiography. Her work has received the sup­port, among others, of the Centre alle­mand d’his­toire de l’art (Max Weber Foundation), Trinity College (Cambridge), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the British Academy, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauch Dienst (DAAD), the Kluge Center, Library of Congress, Washington DC, the INHA and the French Academy at Rome (Villa Medici). She curated the India pavilion of Photo Dubai Exhibition (2016), co-curated the exhi­bi­tion Gedney in India (Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, 2017; Duke University, 2018) and is a guest curator of the next Dhaka Art Summit (2018).

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 16th, 2PM - 4PM

Meditation in move­ment ses­sion by Janine Bharucha.
Full capacity.

“I Meditate In Movement. Capitalized, I MIM. The MIM I teach is made of a suc­ces­sion of simple, effec­tive move­ments, acces­sible to all with a short length. Through dif­ferent move­ments, static pos­tures, shifts, you will develop the aware­ness of your body in space, con­trol of bal­ance and con­cen­tra­tion. “ By Janine Bharucha.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4TH, 4PM - 7PM

Sieste Électronique #1 : Music for an art center
Carte blanche to Les Sieste électroniques.

"While the music is more portable than ever and we spend most of our time lis­tening to auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ated playlists according to our “moods" ("sunny after­noon","dynamic house­hold” or even "time cap­sule"), we wonder about our ability to col­lec­tively share a care­fully selected playlist for a par­tic­ular time and place.
For this first Sieste électronique at the Villa, we invited the English label Dream Catalog, pioneers of a dema­te­ri­al­ized music that develops a pow­erful sym­bolic imag­i­nary."

For more infor­ma­tion about Les Sieste électroniques.
For more infor­ma­tion about the label Dream Catalogue

OFF-SITE EVENTS

Gondwana Series: Interventions by the Clark House House Initiative at Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Curated by Sumesh Sharma.
October 25 to 29, 2017.
Centre Pompidou, Place Georges-Pompidou, 75004 Paris, France.

A series of talks and film screen­ings are chore­ographed in an attempt to bring forth a dis­course on diver­sity and the con­text of artist prac­tices of the moment in South Asia. Historical reading of facts, myths and folk­tales com­prise in forming mod­ernist visions of the state. Dr. BR Ambedkar, the archi­tect of the Republic of India refrained from forming a nation but rather a Republic ascer­taining sym­bols of neu­trality drawn from Buddhist iconog­raphy, that would help chart the iden­tity of the union. In a society that offi­cially rec­og­nizes more than 22 offi­cial lan­guages, con­tains the diver­sity of opposing faiths, con­tests its eth­nic­i­ties between the ideas of the Indo-European migra­tion and the Dravidian South, we spec­u­late a visual cul­ture. A society that is still pos­sessed by a silent apartheid of caste that then man­i­fests in com­plex class divi­sions, mod­ernist aspi­ra­tions of devel­op­ment define the con­tem­po­rary. We inhabit an India that houses a bur­geoning economy and a fas­cist right promising the deliv­er­ance of a depar­ture from a past but also a rewriting of a his­tory to claim past civ­i­liza­tions and hope for a dis­honest renais­sance. What con­texts allow us a nar­ra­tive and where do we start to speak of these ques­tions? Modernism in India can de defined and decon­structed by the move­ments of social jus­tice that then authored a con­sti­tu­tion that devel­oped a sec­ular char­acter in form and format. The sym­bols of the nascent Indian Republic took on the vocab­u­lary of the Ashokan Empire, its iconog­raphy in the form of the Lion Capital of the Ashokan Pillar from Sarnath and Nandalal Bose was invited to decro­rate the con­sti­tu­tion that would be rec­ti­fied by the assembly on the 26th of January 1950.

Gondwana is the tec­tonic plate that formed when India broke away from Africa and joined the Asian Geographical mass. The sub­con­ti­nent of South Asia was formed, a region divided by terse polit­ical lines and dis­unity. Home to more than 1.5 bil­lion people, Indian hege­mony is chal­lenged by many mutinies and this clearly man­i­fests in the pro­duc­tion of art. The Gondwana Series, the name of this chore­og­raphy of talks, screen­ings and per­for­mances, draws from Cheikh Anta Diop’s def­i­ni­tion of Indian civ­i­liza­tion, one that was derived from Africa.

October 25, 6 pm: Black? Political Consciousness beyond nation, Black iden­ti­ties in India.
Conversation with: Kemi Bassene (artist and musi­col­o­gist), Amol K Patil (artist), Yogesh Barve (artist).
Moderation: Paul Goodwin.
Screening of films by Yogesh Barve, Naresh Kumar, Ranjeeta Kumari, Amol K Patil, Saviya Lopes et Parachar Naik.

October 26, 6 pm: The Scape for a Modern - Films by Jean Bhownagary.
Conversation with: Samit Das (artist and art his­to­rian, 2017 Pernod Ricard Fellow), Eric Stephany (artist) and Mélanie Bouteloup (director of Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research & Villa Vassilieff).
Moderation: Sumesh Sharma.
Screening of films by Jean Bhownagary.

October 27, 6 pm: Kinematic Modern.
Conversation with: Aurelien Froment (artist), Aurelien Mole (artist & pho­tog­ra­pher), Virgile Fraisse (artist & researcher), Ahmadou Badiane (musi­cian), Somnath Mukherjee (chore­og­ra­pher and dance teacher).
Screening of films by Aurélien Froment, Virgile Fraisse et Hsiai-fei Chang.

October 29, 5 pm: Transculturalities & the idea of India
Conversation with: Kader Attia (artist and reser­acher) and Jihan El-Tahri (artist and doc­u­men­tary film maker).
Moderation: Shaina Anand (CAMP).
Screening of films by Kader Attia and Tyeb Mehta.

The Gondwana Series is sup­ported by Kadist Art Foundation.