The idea, and the image of it

ARTS DIARY

* Concepts & Ideas: CIMA Gallery, Kolkata’s annual exhibition opened yesterday and will continue until September 13. Like in former years, the show attempts to catch concepts, practices, artists who have a distinctive vocabulary and will be important in the days to come.

There are five young participants this time: Kabir Mohanty, Rm Palaniappan, Kingshuk Sarkar, Avishek Sen and Sanjeev Sonpimpare.

* Still Moving Image: Devi Art Foundation opens its exhibition space in Gurgaon with this selection of video and photographs from the Anupam and Lekha Poddar collection, curated around “the centrality of the moving picture in India’s public domain”.

There’ll be 25 artists on show, among them Atul Bhalla, Bharti Kher, Nalini Malani, Tushar Joag, Ram Rehman and Vivan Sundaram. The exhibition will continue until November.

* Art Berlin Contemporary: Bodhi Berlin will showcase the work of two major contemporary artists — N S Harsha and Natraj Sharma — at the Art Berlin Contemporary (September 4-7). The focus at the ABC this year being on sculpture, installation and the projected image, Sharma reconstructs his flight series of airplanes suspended within steel grids.

* Trash: Vivan Sundaram’s installation, a magnificent meditation on the inevitable byproduct of our consumerist frenzy — garbage — comes to Delhi. There’ll also be photographs and videos by the artist at Photoink where the show opened yesterday and will continue until September 27.

Auction time

* It’s auction time again, with the Saffronart Autumn Online on September 3-4, followed by Christie’s Southeast Asian Modern + Contemporary Art Sale (which includes the 1954 M F Husain in the picture above) in New York on September 16.

Two days later is Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary Indian Art auction, with the Indian and Southeast Asian sale on the 19th.