http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1878804723792&set=a.1874588178381.102925.1051494565&theater#!/album.php?fbid=1874588178381&id=1051494565&aid=102925

the building!

Shunyosthan Artists’ collective is a ground that fronts. A premise of young men and women merge together on a household platform that incorporates fascinating ideas of pushing the boundaries. A collective grows amidst the inter-developing cells where atomic refractions are often not harmonized when the route is ongoing. Yet the individual mass and movement is a ceaseless evolving so the energy level is ceremonially heightening its abilities to extract something from the public power-house. The unavoidable factors of a metropolis are a crucial sphere to focus on. Through any application of medium practised, the milieu of perception and churning steers us to front the elements of living-hood.

Functioning and developing, developing during sharing, sharing and introspecting hence create the relationship of a cohesive thinking. Our city is our jacket. We catch marks, cold or get bare when we separate. So the pages are linked to perform the spoken world and not to explain or protect the history but archiving and re stirring the inertia and amnesia which form on jacket and then move towards some pages hundred & nineteen. The chapters of media are unlimited so we try to exploit the interactive stages unrolling the handling of it. When we arrive at the cosmopolitan multiplicities of our city or rather the cities within the city the interactive experience becomes our habitation. It is important to understand how we are questioning our aesthetical discourses or are we supposed to create or just apply what we see and perceive? Are we witnesses or do we try to subvert if boundaries exist! We are not aiming to describe anything for sure.

Workshop Detail

STUDIO 21 Presents

Shunyosthan

A Cross media Art Workshop

A Project by Shunyosthan Artists’ Collective

23 -31 March ,2011 workshop (11 am – 7 pm) Sunday close

1-2 April 2011 open studio

Participating Artists

Anirban Datta

Anirban Ghosh

Amitava Adhikary

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

Dhrupadi Ghosh

Joyraj Bhattacharya

Madhuja Mukherjee

Rudra Kishore Mandal

Sujay Mukherjee

Sumona Chakravarty

Syed Taufik Riaz

Tapati Chaudhury

Sampurna Chakraborty (Observer )

Coordinated by

Manas Acharya

Workshop: 23 – 31 March.2011(Sunday Close)

Orientation

Discussion ( Opening day of the workshop on 23 March.2011 at 5 p.m)

Topic : Erasing Boundaries (Recent Cross Media art practices)

Panel :

Sanchayan Ghosh

Madhuja Mukherjee

Adip Dutta

Ashavari Majumdar

Moderator: Sampurna Chakraborty

Open Studio:

1^st & 2^nd April. 2011

An Artists’ Collective is a cooperative body of people seeking to collaborate and work on shared ideological paradigm, exchanging principles and questions on individual artistic practices, working tools, space etc., as an extended family. The concepts of art collectives are not new when considering the traditional norms of exhibiting in a gallery space or a group performance. But the current art collectives in India propagate collaboration with every avenue of their practice that is desirable. Time has been a very crucial factor in the process of cultural shifts and their identities and vice versa. We are at a point in time when boundaries are being broken to bridge those gaps which have defined artistic methods. It is then relevant that cultural practitioners from multiple fields share their working processes with each other. And in aspiration to analyse those gaps, a group of like minded people have gathered and call themselves Shunyoshathan (bengali word; meaning blank space) Artists’ Collective. They are based in Kolkata and yes!! they are also virtual. Like the other art collectives, they reside on the web world, that intrinsically collective medium; They are fluid in size. The kinds of art they produce vary widely, but when it is political it tends to be actively so. But what they do, or rather the way they do it, outside the centralized, market-determining power structures of the mainstream art world, could turn out to have political consequences for the way art develops. They are committed to questioning, collaborating, sharing, informing, educating and building alternative environments for communicating ideas and distributing work.

The Shunyosthan Artists’ Collective is going to render them through a cross media art workshop, with emerging and professional art practitioners, media professional, researchers, and students from different backgrounds in performance and new media. They are committed to sharing their interest in developing a deeper understanding of composing work; focused on real time, interactive or time-based experiences and multidisciplinary collaborative processes (video, sound processing, projection design, lighting, choreography and directing).

The participating artists are Anirban Datta who started his career as a screenwriter before he joined Satyajit Ray Film & TV Institute (SRFTI), as a student in the department of Direction & Screenplay Writing. Tetris was his diploma film from SRFTI in 2006, premiered in Cannes’06 and traveled to a few important international festivals. Chronicle of an Amnesiac, made for the Japanese public broadcaster NHK in 2007, has been his first film after he graduated from the film school; Anirban Ghosh is a graphic Designer,from Rabindra Bharati University: Amitava Adhikari is an art and theory practitioner with a BFA from Kala Bhavan and MFA from MS University of Baroda. He has been an Image Researcher at the Photography Dept. of NID and he is currently working on his PhD on the ‘Changing Paradigms of the Folk: Pat and Patuas of West Bengal’ at the department of Art History, Kalabhavan, Viswabharati. Amitava is also a theatre activist associated with Sakamal and Kankhawa. Budhaditya Chattopadhyay incorporates field recording, sound design and new media to produce works of musique concrete, sound composition and immersive installation; his work primarily involves found sonic-objects, engineered by media intervention and digital manipulation. He is an alumnus of SRFTI and recently completed a Master of Arts in New Media from Aarhus University, Denmark. A former Sarai fellow, Budhaditya presented his audio-works at venues including Transmediale in Berlin, EreticArt in Florence, CAVI in Aarhus and Programme for Sonic Arts in Copenhagen; Dhrupadi Ghosh is a graduate from Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati University. Her working area includes the physical public domain involving local community. She executes her works through graffiti, posters, stickers, installation and performances. She is associated with Sarai, Delhi Urban Platform, Kankhawa, Jeeon and Agami Nirman; Madhuja Mukherjee teaches in Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She is the author of the book New Theatres Ltd., published in 2009, by NFAI, Pune. Mukherjee has also edited the volume Ray at Work..., a publication of St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, in 2005. She has written articles in international and national journals on topics like Bollywood, Amitabh Bachchan, the Indian studios, new Indian cinema, gender, media, sound, cultures and film music etc. Madhuja has also written the film EKTI TARAR KHONJE 2010; Rudra Kishore Mandal has worked as a graphic designer for 6 years in Hyderabad, Delhi and Mumbai. He resumed creating independent artworks in painting, digital graphics and installations after he moved back to Kolkata in 2008. His works are expressions of personal confusions, visions, emotions and realizations which usually have a paradoxical standpoint. Sujoy Mukherjee is a graduate from Rabindra Bharati University & post graduate from Visva-bharati,santiniketan. He has participated in various national and international exhibitions and workshops such as, International Contemporary Art Centre, Casoria Contemporary Art Museum Naples (Italy),Tell-Tale: Fiction, Falsehood & Fact-II,Gallery Experimenter Participated in the FICA annual group show 2009. Sumona Chakravarty is a graduate from the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore 2009. Using video, theater, graphic design and public art she is passionate about using art to create platforms for dialogue and social engagement. Her current work explores the role of art in education and community building. She loves creating treasure hunts, staring back at people who spit on the road and finding secret notes in old library books, and these seemingly random acts often influence her work in strange ways. Syed Taufik Riaz is also from the discipline of art and theory and graduated from Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati. His work is in the area of performance art. Tapati Chowdhury is a young artist based in Kolkata. She has done her masters in painting from Syracuse University, NY and RabindraBharati University. Apart from painting, Tapati is also involved in exploring other new media like site specific installation and video. She has participated in many group shows both in India and abroad. Tapati has received the prestigious Abbey Mural Fellowship, National Academy Museum, NYC, Creative Proposal Grant, VPA Department, Syracuse University, NY.

And all these high spirited individuals come together to work and exchange in the space identified as STUDIO 21 (17L Dover Terrace) in Kolkata from 23^rd to 31^st March, 2001. The workshop will be opened by a discussion on “Erasing Boundaries (Recent Cross Media art practices)” by Sanchayan Ghosh, Adip Dutta, Ashavari Majumdar and Madhuja Mukherjee as the panel. This workshop will be followed by an Open Studio where artists will share/demonstrate their experiences and expertise, particularly from the workshop to a larger gathering. Sampurna Chakraborty, also a product of Kala Bhavana Visva Bharati University, hail from the discipline of art and theory and alternate (parallel) practices, will be observing the whole event and will add her commentaries on the account of such collectives and collaborations and their consequences. Coordinating and curating this whole project is Manas Acharya, who is also a practicing artist and curator in charge of Studio 21.

For Information : Manas Acharya: studio21.gallery@gmail.com

Panel Discussion

Discussion ( Opening day of the workshop on 23 March.2011 at 5 p.m)

Topic : Erasing Boundaries (Recent Cross Media art practices)

Panel :

Sanchayan Ghosh

Madhuja Mukherjee

Adip Dutta

Ahsavari Majumder

Moderator: Sampurna Chakraborty

Short bio of the panelist:

Sanchayan Ghosh

Sanchayan Ghosh is an art practitioner who is versed in site specific installations and stage settings. He is a recipient of the Charles Wallace scholarship. At present he is the Head of the Department of Painting, Kalabhavana, University of Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan.

Adip Dutta

Adip Dutta an art practitioner diversely working on sculptural installations. He writes significant text on art practice and curates prominent expositions. Presently he works as Faculty in Rabindra Bharati University,Kolkata.

Ashavari Majumdar

Ashavari Majumdar has trained in the Lucknow gharana of Kathak under Pt Vijay Shankar at Padatik, Calcutta and Pt Birju Maharaj in New Delhi. She has performed as a solo Kathak artist and held Kathak workshops in venues in India and abroad. Ashavari has graduated with honours in English Literature from St Stephen’s College and earned a first class Master’s degree from the University of Delhi.

He experiments with Kathak technique explore the interaction between movement, text and image in various ways. She is involved in re-examining the relation between movement and text in traditional as well as ‘contemporary’ abhinaya and has also produced a critically acclaimed dance theatre piece drawing on ‘daily’ movement, martial arts and Kathak.

Ashavari was awarded a National Scholarship by the Government of India to pursue her training in Kathak. She was also awarded a scholarship by Emory University for a PhD program in English. She has scripted and directed a number of short films including a dance film produced by Channel 4, UK on the occasion of 60 years of Indian Independence.

Currently she is developing ‘Shurpanakha’-a project funded by the India Foundation for the Arts

Madhuja Mukherjee

Madhuja Mukherjee teaches in Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She is the author of the book New Theatres Ltd.,..., published in 2009, by NFAI, Pune. Mukherjee has also edited the volume Ray at Work..., a publication of St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, in 2005. She has written articles in international and national journals on topics like Bollywood, Amitabh Bachchan as star, the Indian studios, New Indian cinemas, gender, media, sound cultures and film music etc.

Mukherjee has also written the film Ekti Tarar Khonje (2010) and is presently involved with other productions (including films by Heimat Films, Germany). Recently she has co-directed an experimental video Re-take and a short film Red Orchid on 35 mm. She has written and illustrated graphic stories ‘Threads’, ‘Yellow Leaves’, etc., published in Drighangchu, No.2 (a journal for graphic novels).

Sampurna Chakraborty, also a product of Kala Bhavana Visva Bharati University, comes from the discipline of art and theory and alternate (parallel) practices, will be observing the whole event and will add her commentaries on the account of such collective and collaborations and their consequences

Shunyosthan presents...

Shunyosthan

A Cross Media Art Workshop

by

Shunyosthan Artists’ Collective

Workshop: March 23 – 31, 2011 (Sunday closed)

Panel discussion: March 23, 2011 from 5 pm-7pm

Open studio: April 1, 2011, 6pm -8 pm

April 2, 2011, 11 am- 7 pm

Looking forward to your active presence.

Manas Acharya

(Curator-Coordinator)

Studio 21
17L, Dover Terrace
Kolkata 700 019
Tel:2486 6735
E-mail : studio21.gallery@gmail.com

Brainstorming

The Shunyosthan or Blank Space seduces you to fill it up

with memories warped by time

nostalgia of the city as it was

childhood, melas, the cinema

it draws the outside in

and pushes the insides out

in flux

blurring the edges

public private private public

we come to dismantle the white box

the serenity and sanctity

of mundane measured transactions

and counter stagnation

(Regurgitating some thoughts from the meeting last Wednesday!)

The Second Meeting

We all met again last weekend, the 6th of March, to discuss plans and share past work. After the initial discussion dividing the work up to the 23rd March Workshop and Open House (more details coming soon!) we all huddled around the Studio 21 laptop to look at each others work.

There was a general sense of camraderie and mutual appreciation as we were all mostly in unfamiliar company, and therefore very diplomatic around each other! Looking forward to more dissent as well as confluencing ideas as Shunyosthan moves forward.