“Art has also proved a vital source of inspiration and comfort for people in this dark time.”

• Chila Kumari Singh Burman

The second wave of the Covid-19 virus has come as a surprise to many of us that have been cautious and safe with our interactions or to many a second call of reckoning. As we battle the newest mutation of the novel virus, we see the world slowly stepping back to a situation most of us remember all too vividly.

While acknowledging the catastrophic consequences that have upturned the last year, we hope to alleviate the looming feelings that rightly seem to be bubbling to the surface.

The online art movement has been a blanket equaliser for many artists that felt absent from the problematic institutions and spaces’ lack of accountability and inclusion. As the world wide web expands the reach of programmes now available to web surfers, art enthusiasts and researchers, we’re rounding off our top selection of online exhibitions, workshops, podcasts and events this month.

A Collaborative Look At Cultural Management Folded Into A Participative Zine

Led by Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai, this intriguing digital zine workshop invites students, artists, arts and cultural managers to dig deeper into the cultural management process, running through the nuts and bolts of management design.

As part of Goethe Institut’s larger “Cultural Management in the Digital Age” programme, ACRI and Max Mueller Bhavan bring you this collaborative experience to produce a collective zine or hybrid instruction manual that foregrounds and splices processes of managing the arts space in a country with the richness of culture.

The workshop encourages sharing between participants to work with the organisation’s own CMDA fellows (Cultural Management in the Digital Age) to explore creating, documenting, sharing and fostering community in the digital cultural landscape of India.

This is a great chance to immerse yourself in an exchange of ideas, a discussion of the current trends in cultural management, and build a long lasting relationships with experts and thinkers in the field.

You can register for the event here.

Dates : 29th April ; 5:00 PM- 7:00 PM IST

Curating for a Digital Age

Exhibitions have found their home on the internet this 2021 and with no signs of stopping, this webinar comes at the perfect time. Exhausting ideas of an online exhibition, practitioners are searching for new ways to imagine digital spaces of art.

The 2 day- webinar titled “Curating on the web” hosted by Walkin Studios and supported by Asia-Europe Foundation aims to stimulate and expand critical and practical thinking about curatorial work in the digital sphere.

Focussing on online curatorial interventions that challenge the mechanisms and traditional models of producing and displaying contemporary art, attendees can learn of the historical overview of viewing contemporary art and inform themselves of news perspectives and ways of imaging art “being online”.

Sign up for the event here.

Dates : 29th April- 30th April ; 6:00 PM IST

The Complicated Persistence of Colonial History

Colonial narratives require reconstitution and the pandemic saw events taking place all over the world that demanded institutional change in the way states protected and portrayed colonial figures.

America reported a swarm of protests that led to the demolition of multiple statues across the country, the precarious nature of history finds itself at the centre of debate with a certain respect to art and monuments. These objects carry within them inherently political messages.

Harvard graduates Heidi K Brandow, and former member of the Art Fervour team, Divya Saraf, tackle these perniciously problems with “The Reconfiguring Histories Symposium”, presenting artists, activists and scholars working on museum discourse related to institutionalized knowledge with a focus on provenance, nattrative, decolonial curatorial praxis and community engagement.

The online symposium will be hosted by the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Forms of Assembly. Guest speakers include Sumona Chakravarti founder of Hamdasti and fellow graduate from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and deputy director of Ghare Baire, DAG Museums, Kolkata ; Associate Professor at New York University, Jane Anderson ; Jordan Poorman Cocker, Indegenious curator and artist from the Kiowa Tribe and Kingdom of Tonga amongst other celebrated curators and academics.

You can sign up for the symposium here.

Dates : 28th April ; 12:00 PM – 7:00 PM EDT

Rest Your Eyes With The Sounds of Inspiration

We spent roughly more than half of 2020 at home. One would imagine it to be difficult to find inspiration upon looking at the same book shelf, plant collection and hurled array of paraphernalia. For artist and educator Hannah Zimmerman, this daunting expanse of interior space is used as a documentation of time, and as a way to explore her own identity through introspection. Beautifully capturing the quiet, quotidian scenes with her subdued serene colour palette, her work creates room for confusion and reflection.

In this particular episode of the Teaching Artist Podcast, host and art teacher Rebecca Pots, speaks to Zimmerman. Announced as a podcast for kids, this insightful and inspiring conversation between host-and-teacher, teacher-and-teacher and host-and-artist opens up into a variety of themes that give you a deeper understanding of Zimmermans’ own practice and an honest opportunity to hear two art educators discuss their journey.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Exploring Queerness from the streets of London to the galleries of Mumbai

Jhaveri Contemporary brings together three London-based artists – Photographer, Sunil Gupta; Painter, Jake Grewal and Sculptor, Prem Sahib for their latest physical and now online exhibition – “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”. The three artists interact in an intergenerational dialogue using three separate mediums that speak of queer realities and form.

In a sort of Amazonian essence, Jake Grewal’s vicious paintings remind you of the playfulness of Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name. “Lurking In The Little Weeds” and “Haunted Sunsets” evoke its own humid romance as we view the subjects that gaze back at us with relaxed caution. After his recent major retrospective at the Photographers’ Gallery , London, Sunil Gupta’s returns home for this group show reminding of the evocative and skilled tenderness of his photographs.

Sahib’s ceramic tiled photographs capture the opacity of the industrial material that gives form to his images seen in the “Middletown Green” series.

You can view the exhibition here.

Dates : 11th March – 29th May

As museums and galleries create new digital pin codes for themselves, view our selection of available virtual tours and explore the collections of some of the most visited art institutions in the world here.

• Art Fervour Picks