Major galleries create a joint online platform to continue celebrating art

The online exhibition platform, In Touch, in its first outing features artists represented by 10 prominent galleries in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Dubai.

Mumbai artist Aditi Singh is well-known for painting flowers in unusual ways to show both their tenacity and fragility. Less known, though, is the fact that she has been drawing a horizon line — the point where the sky meets the earth — every single day since 2012. It started after the sudden death of a loved one and stayed on as “an emotional heft, a looking onward,” says Singh. Long after the horizons disappear, Singh’s paintings, ink on washi paper, hold on to the memory of those landscapes.

Her work is starkly different from the late Madan Mahatta’s photographs, which document India warming up to modernist architecture, or Chitra Ganesh’s pop colour oeuvre, which celebrates fantastical narratives and feminist mythology. Bringing such disparate, standalone voices together on a virtual platform is In Touch, an online exhibition that in its first outing features artists represented by 10 prominent galleries in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Dubai.

Born over WhatsApp conversations between gallerists over the last fortnight, the first edition of In Touch will continue for a month on Artintouch.in. This alliance, which comes at a time when much of the world has seen the closing of public spaces, grew organically, says Shireen Gandhy of Mumbai’s Chemould Prescott Road. “All of this emerged from conversations between friends who happen to be colleagues and could also be rivals,” says Gandhy. 

Sunil Padwal's Things Exactly as They Are

As physical distancing remains the norm for the foreseeable future, In Touch’s website, with grids demarcated by a single art work, have become the portals to individual exhibitions, like booths at an art fair.

“We might have more artists and galleries who want to join the coming editions, there may be those who want to drop out. There’s no hard and fast rule as to where we go from here,” says Gandhy. It is this possibility of expanding the scope of the exhibition’s programming that makes In Touch “a unique collaborative platform,” say Prateek and Priyanka Raja, directors at Kolkata’s Experimenter gallery.

Aditi Singh's ink on washi paper works

While the challenges around space and placement recede, an online exhibition is a different exercise altogether, says Sunitha Kumar Emmart, director of GALLERYSKE (in Bengaluru and Delhi). “Here you are doing it in a space where there are just no architectural definitions,” she says. Each of the 10 galleries has a dedicated section to explore their own themes through virtual exhibitions, and viewers can reach out to them directly for artworks through the website. The platform will also host a series of discussions and talks.

Dhruv Malhotra's untitled work

While Experimenter brings to this edition an exhibition themed around ideas of collective action and unity, such as Pune-based Prabhakar Pachpute’s striking sculpture The Bull, Sea of Fists (plaster of Paris with metal, coconut fibre, wood, stone powder and more), Dubai’s Green Art Gallery has a three-person show, including works by Lebanese-born artist Chaouki Choukini’s (often) wooden sculptures that float between totemic and mechanical worlds.

Delhi’s PHOTOINK has put forward Mahatta’s work, alongside more contemporary works, like Dhruv Malhotra’s pigment print of diffused sunlight streaming into a park. Vadehra Art Gallery (also in Delhi) is calling its exhibition No Man Is an Island and features artworks as diverse as Shilpa Gupta’s translite board to Faiza Butt’s story-telling ceramics. Delhi’s Nature Morte also has a stellar line up with artists such as Bharti Kher.

Prabhakar Pachpute's The Bull

Some works particularly mark these times of isolation, like Baroda-based Abir Karmakar’s Gate, a work put out by GALLERYSKE, and Hyderabad-based Varunika Saraf’s The Miasma of Violence.  Saraf and Singh’s work is represented by Chemould Prescott Road, as is a bronze sculpture by Mysuru-based N S Harsha. His protagonist, a man eating from a plantain leaf, conjures up images of gatherings of the past and future, while also underlining our interactions with food.

Delhi’s Gallery Espace has taken this time to turn the spotlight on four female artists, which includes Chitra Ganesh. Gallery director Renu Modi talks of how the platform assures one of “a stronger, cumulative voice, and greater viability”. What this platform has achieved, adds Emmart, is the opportunity to continue having conversations around art. “It’s been akin to therapy,” she says.