Upcoming Exhibition
& Events
THE BODY NEVER LIES OPENING RECEPTION, TUESDAY 11 MAY 5:30-9:00PM
The opening reception for The Body Never Lies: Woodcut Prints by S. Chandramohan is on Tuesday 11 May, 2010, 5:30pm onward. Works available for previews on 6 - 10 May 2010. RSVP serindiagallery@gmail.com.
THE BODY NEVER LIES: WOODCUT PRINTS BY S. CHANDRAMOHAN
11 MAY - 20 JUNE 2010 (SHOW EXTENDED TIL 20 JUNE)
“The body never lies.” — Martha Graham, dancer
This exhibition features the first solo exhibition by one of India’s finest contemporary artists: Srilamantula CHANDRAMOHAN. Hailing from a traditional carpentry family in South India, Chandramohan won several important national and international awards, including the Lalit Kala Akademi award, India’s most prestigious national art award, and the Bharat Bhavan Bienniale, an international print competition in 2008. His works explore the issue of sexuality, desire, and guilt, communicated powerfully through the medium of large-format woodcut prints. The bold, graphic use of color is one of the signifying traits of Chandramohan’s body of work, as is his iconic self-representation. His works are an important part in the evolution of contemporary Indian art in the 21st century. Chandramohan is at the forefront of the new vanguard of modern Indian artists, pushing his contemporaries and the viewing public into an era of fresh, bold, and challenging artistic expression.
AVALOKITEŚVARA: Buddhist Paintings from Nepal, Selections by Robert Beer
11 March - 25 April 2010
Avalokiteśvara, the ‘Beholding Lord’, is the Bodhisattva of Compassion and the patron deity of Tibet, whose principal emanation is the Dalai Lama, and who is invoked by the famous six-syllable mantra: OM MA-NI PAD-ME HUM. In the Newar Buddhist tradition of Nepal he is commonly known as Lokeśvara, the ‘Lord of the World’, or as Mahakarunika, the ‘Great Compassionate One’, who has a hundred-and-eight different manifestations. And in China he is strongly identified with the Goddess of Mercy, Guan Shi Yin (觀世音), she who ‘Hears the Cries of this World’, who likewise has a hundred-and eight different manifestations.
According to a popular legend Avalokiteśvara once vowed that he would first free all beings from suffering before attaining liberation himself, so he set about this task with great effort. But when he saw how few he had so far saved compared to how many still remained, his sudden despair caused his head and body to explode into many pieces. Seeing his plight, Amitabha Buddha then came swiftly to his aid, and from all the shattered fragments reconstructed his body into a far more powerful form, with eleven heads and a thousand arms, so that he was able to gaze compassionately over all beings in the ten directions and reach out to them with his many arms. Another legend tells how two lakes were formed from Avalokiteśvara’s tears of despair, and from these lakes arose the lotus-borne forms of Green and White Tara.
Avalokiteśvara is the principal Bodhisattva or ‘Spiritual Son’ of red Amitabha Buddha, who presides over the western direction as the ‘Lord of the Padma or Lotus Family’, whose symbol is a lotus. In the Newar tradition Lokeshvara most popular aspect is as Padmapani, the ‘Lotus-bearer’, who stands gracefully upon a lotus-pedestal while holding the stem of a lotus in his left hand. Lokeshvara is usually white or sometimes red in colour, with two, four, eight or a thousand arms, and his characteristic emblem is an antelope-skin that is draped over his left shoulder.
Although this Bodhisattva of Compassion is widely adored and venerated throughout the Buddhist world, many of his unique Newar aspects are still unknown outside the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal. So we have chosen to present some of these rare aspects of Lokeshvara in this exhibition, along with those that are more widely known within the Indo-Tibetan or Mahayana Buddhist traditions.
Robert Beer is internationally-renowned author of the Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs (Serindia Publications) and a specialist of Buddhist paintings from Nepal. His selections for this exhibition include pieces from living master painters in Nepal.
VIEW THE COLLECTION OF ORIGINAL WORKS
VIEW THE COLLECTION OF ARCHIVAL PRINTS
MONGOLIA: Platinum Prints by Hamid Sardar-Afkhami
28 January - 28 February 2010
Inspired by the pioneers of ethno-photography during the Age of Exploration, such as Edward Curtis who photographed the Indian peoples of North America and Canada, Hamid Sardar-Afkhami dedicates his cameras to making a visual record of Mongolia’s last nomad tribes. Following horse-breeders, bear-hunters, wolf-tamers, eagle-masters and reindeer riders on their seasonal migrations, Sardar-Afkhami presents timeless iconic compositions that take us to a place where men still speak the language of the animals.
This Mongolia portfolio is featured in platinum prints - considered the ‘king of visual prints’ – they display unsurpassed and long-lasting details, produced by direct exposure of negatives on platinum deposits brushed directly into the paper. Some photographers only printed certain images in platinum (Irving Penn’s photographs, for example). The result is greater tonal range, detail and longevity unmatched by other methods using classic silver gelatin or the digital process.
TAYLOR CAMP 1969-1977 by John Wehrheim
15 December 2009 - 16 January 2010
“Impressive! The photos are a real time capsule of an era and a place — humane and atmospheric — and news to most people. I love the faces and bodies, and the theme of violated Eden, or After the Fall…” — PAUL THEROUX
In 1969, Howard Taylor, brother of actress Elizabeth, bailed out a rag-tag band of thirteen young Mainlanders jailed on Kauai (an island 90 miles northwest of Honolulu) for vagrancy and invited them to camp on his oceanfront land. Soon waves of hippies, surfers and troubled Vietnam vets found their way to Taylor Camp and built a clothing-optional, pot-friendly tree house village at the end of the road on the island’s North Shore. In 1977, after condemning the village to make way for a State park, government officials torched the camp — leaving little but ashes and memories of “the best days of our lives.” Powerful photos from the seventies reveal a community that rejected consumerism for the healing power of nature while the story of Taylor Camp’s eight-year existence is documented through interviews made thirty years later with the campers, their neighbors and the Kauai officials who finally got rid of them.
TIBET OUTSIDE TIBET: A Photographer’s Journey through Tibet’s Borderlands by Luke Duggleby
5 November - 6 December 2009
Modern cartography drastically simplifies the complexities of a region and none more so than Tibet. Through generations of governance by the People’s Republic of China, maps of the world feature Tibet as the Tibetan Autonomous Region or TAR. Viewing a map it can be assumed that everything Tibetan exists within these penned boundaries. Yet all things Tibetan, its people, its culture, its languages exist in strength well beyond the boundaries of the TAR. In China, Tibetan culture exists throughout the surrounding provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan. It is in these areas that Luke Duggleby finds his Tibet. His photographs tell stories of modern pilgrims, caterpillar fungus collectors, ancient salt terraces, nomads, and Tibetan catholics.
Paris in Panorama by Jaroslav Poncar
17 September - 31 October 2009
The earliest panoramic photographs of Paris dated in the mid-1800s right at the beginning of the invention of panoramic camera. Some photographs of Paris in this format survived and are now in the Carnavalet Museum in Paris. Jaroslav Poncar’s photographs of Paris were taken with the old Russian FT-2, which is not only a tiny, pocket-sized camera but also the only panoramic camera that can be used with a 50mm lens and a standard 35mm film (whereas all others are equipped with wide-angle lens). Inspired by the great Czech photographer Josef Sudek, who created in the early 1950s a panoramic portrait of Prague, Jaroslav Poncar started in 1977 to work on a portrait of Paris. In both color and black-and-white, the exhibition shows Paris at its most serene and inspiring.
Robert Powell: Recent Works
16 July - 12 September 2009
Works by Robert Powell has long been admired by architects and scholars and have been exhibited at the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Washington, DC, and the Ethnographic Museum, University of Zurich. They have also been collected by private collectors as well as by institutions. His recent works, shown here for the first time, includes new works on Mustang, Kathmandu, Angkor Wat, and imaginary series. His sense of colors and mood reflects the Himalayan landscapes; his paintings have details of precise architectural elements executed masterfully in watercolors.
