Still Moving Images (2008)

Story of the Making

Right from the beginning, DevI Art Foundation set the tone to bring in fresh ideas and new voices through its exhibitions. Devi Art Foundation, at Sirpur House, Gurgaon, opened its doors with an exhibition dedicated to video and photography. In keeping with the vision of the Foundation, Deeksha Nath, a young graduate just out of The Goldsmiths College, London, was brought in to build a narrative around the medium of the Still and the Moving images for the exhibition. This colloquy was equally a challenge and an opportunity, as there were no rules or conformity. In putting the show together, many obscure finds surfaced. Works of 25 Indian artists, from Vivan Sundaram’s The Great Indian Bazaar sprawled on the floor to Nalini Malini’s elaborate installation titled Remembering Toba Tek Singh to an early work by Rameshwar Broota, were displayed, which were inviting and haunting at the same time.

Highlights

– Still Moving Image was the opening exhibition of the then newly founded Devi Art Foundation, and as such facilitated many approaches to reading the ‘new’, the inaugural moment.

– The title Still Moving Image referred to two things: in the first instance, an exhibition of photography and video works and secondly, an examination of images that ‘move us’.

– The exhibition was built on the works of Indian photography and video artists; and engaged with a broad range of themes.

Participating Artists:

Ravi Agarwal, Atul Bhalla, Rameshwar Broota, Sheba Chhachhi, Aastha Chauhan, Baptist Coehlo, Shilpa Gupta, Tushar Joag, Ranbir Kaleka, Bharti Kher, Sonia Khurana, Susanta Mandal, Nalini Malani, Pushpamala. N, Varsha Nair, Ram Rahman, Surekha, Tejal Shah, Valay Shende, Sudarshan Shetty, Mithu Sen, Kiran Subbaiah, Vivan Sundaram, Navin Thomas, and Avinash Veeraraghavan