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Showing posts from August, 2023

Artists' alternative vision of India now in Ahmedabad: 'Moral critique of the present'

  It was a pleasant surprise the other day. I received a phone call from Sohail Hashmi, who during my early college days initiated me into Left-wing student politics in Delhi University; the year was 1971. Sohail said he was in Ahmedabad. I asked him to come over. However, he told me he had come with an exhibition of the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust ( Sahmat ) on creative expressions of artists on 75 years of India’s independence. So I should reach there at its inauguration. Organised at  Arthshila , a studio which claims to “facilitate artistic expression and curate creative experiences", situated next to the high-profile Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A), I reached there to meet Sohail, whom I had not seen since mid-1970s, though would occasionally interact on phone (and sometimes on social media). On reaching there, sitting just outside the studio, he told me that in all Sahmat had collected 280 creative expressions, of which about 128 were on display at Arthshil