Hyderabad, February 09, 2019 The #16/622 Collective, a group of four internationally acclaimed Indian artists, organizes a 10-day exhibition here in the city at The State Art Gallery, Road No. 1, Kavuri Hills, Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad.
It was formally opened on 9th February at 6 pm. The show will go on until 18th February. It will be open to public from 10 am to 6 pm from the 10th February onwards.
The four young women, all under 30 years include Lalitha Bandaru from Hyderabad, Pragya Bhargava from Gurgaon, Aparajitha Vaasudev from Bengaluru and Vickie Aravindhan from Singapore, are holding a 10-day art exhibition titled "A Eulogy To Things That Never Were."
Giving details about the show, Lalitha Bandaru one of the four artists said, "We live in dense times: made up by endless layers of human activity and geotic flux, that keep shifting and changing with the inexorable forward march of time. These transitions are manifested both in the physical and temporal spheres of our existence. As we negotiate these transforming layers we hold on to traces of the past, material and immaterial. This tenuous relationship we have with the past is something we substantiate through word and image, through personal and public relics. They are evidence of the drastic transformation of nature and human memory over time. This collaboration explores how history; both personal and collective; is remembered, renewed and imagined"
Giving details about the individual artists' works, Lalitha Bandaru said: Vickie Aravindhan is exhibiting a series of mixed-media sculptures and videos which are reflections on hybridization specifically in the context of Singaporean society, a multicultural, multireligious, multilingual nation, that reveals itself through evidence of forgotten histories, displacement, cultural erasure, language barriers, and a history that has failed to be passed on through generations of diasporic people, as a result of globalisation and its rapid growth and development. She combines fragments of cultural imagery as well as structures with specific connotations to create objects and videos that try to portray a sense of disruption and nonsense.
Pragya Bhargava is exhibiting a collection of mixed media paintings and photographs. In her works she takes familiar natural landscapes and interweaves them with deliberate disruptions. The imperfections and brokenness create a dramatic visual dialogue so that the viewers take notice of the subtle yet constant changes that have transpired. The result is a representation of a world between the real and the imagined, a dichotomy intended for people to stop, look and draw comparisons between what is true and what is fantasy in these deceptively resilient landscapes. Her works encourage conversation, curiosity, understanding, empathy and conscious interaction with the landscapes that surround us.
Aparajitha Vaasudev's work addresses the primeval need to retain memory, to grasp what has gone before, and preserve it for posterity. Through her layered, mixed media paintings, she comments on the imperfections of memory - the gaps and blanks in it; the layered and anamorphic visuals that appear in our minds when we make an effort to remember. At the foundation of her work lies a strong sense of wonder about the ephemerality of life, and about the workings of one's consciousness, about the visible and the invisible, the erased and the entrenched.
Lalitha Bandaru's paintings explore the transience and ephemerality of things in nature more specifically— the crumble and disappearance of the most beautiful, largest and the oldest living systems on the earth -The Coral Reef. Their diversity, their ambiguous organic forms and their decay bring forth another form with their own qualities and hues. The vulnerability and fragility, the phases of their transformations from being alive (extremely colorful) to being dead (bleached or colorless) are aspects that serve as great inspirational triggers in her exhibits.
The four classmates of BA (Hons) at Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore have come together to form a group "The #16/622 Collective", which nostalgically references the address of the flat where they lived together for three years in Singapore while studying there, which was the scene of a great many beautiful memories. They grew there together as artists, as well as closer as a family. That very apartment complex has now been demolished to make way for a new metro station. It is their first exhibition as a group of four together in India. They are now spread over all over the world and live in different cities and countries in India and the USA.
This show is formally inaugurated by Dr. Kasu Prasad Reddy, Founder, MaxiVision Eye Hospital and Nag Ashwin Reddy, Director, Scriptwriter, Producer, of Mahanati fame.
Entry to this exhibition is open and all are invited.
About the Artists
Lalitha Bandaru graduated with a MA (Hons) from Chelsea College of Art, London and a BA(Hons) from Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore and is currently based in the US. She had her first solo show when she was 17 in the year 2010 and has had multiple exhibitions in India, Singapore, London and US since then. Having received the Future Leader Scholarship and the Lasalle Merit Scholarship during her study, she was the youngest to participate in an Art forum 'Warp Artist Village 2015' conducted in Belgium as part of the Triennale Brugge'15 and was also shortlisted for Clifford Chance Sculpture Prize for the year 2017, London. Apart from being a teaching faculty at Kirkland Arts Center, Lalitha also works at the John Grade Studio and continues to pursue her artistic.
