Visual Spaces
H. Masud Taj has encircled the globe, giving talks. He recalls one in which he tried his best to fail. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Architect-Poet-Calligrapher H Masud Taj celebrates World Wada Paav Day, which falls on August 23rd, with his poetry and calligraphy by ruminating on the architecture of the vada pav and most famous diagram in the world drawn by the vegetarian Leonardo da Vinci.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
While there have been many books on Hindi films, there is a need to look at the adverse impacts films may have n society. Bharat Dogra and Madhu Dogra attempt this exercise in their book on the subject. What follows is an edited version of an extract from the book. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
As Chandrayaan-3 heads for the moon, H. Masud Taj recalls as a 13-year-old wannabe poet twirling radio knobs tuning in to the moon landing in a medley ranging from moonrock to alternative rock and featuring Neil Armstrong, Ibn-e-Safi, R.E.M. and Andy Kaufman (yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah).…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Calligrapher H. Masud Taj reflects on why a letter from the seventh century continues to offer solace in moments of grief and personal loss.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
When we pay homage to someone, is the real recipient someone else? H Masud Taj reflects on his choice of B V Doshi quotes.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
The Forgiven is a dark film that has drama, suspense, and visual artistry, at first glance, homage to Bertolucci and Antonioni. More importantly, it asks: What rules or norms of truth determine our burden of responsibility? Then, the central puzzle: Who has the power to forgive? Is forgiveness the end of punishment? Padmaja Challakere reviews.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Morocco’s Football team exceeded wildest expectations at the World Cup in Qatar. H Masud Taj celebrates with calligraphy and a Found Poem based on the words of their coach Walid Regragu…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Calligraphy and Found Poem by H Masud Taj, based on the words of Osama Manzar, to coincide with ’20 Years of Digital Empowerment for All’ symposium that was held in Guwahati on December 16, 2022. Osama Manzar’s mission is to teach rural Indians the use of the Internet and create livelihoods.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
As Qatar, hosting the FIFA World Cup, is inviting the world to Islam, H Masud Taj reciprocates by inviting Qatar too.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
H. Masud Taj celebrates the arrival (der aaye, durrust aaye) of Surya Kumar Yadav with poetry and calligraphy, and cautions the BCCI not to drop the ball.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
H. Masud Taj reminds us through his art that language can become the vehicle of colonization and decolonization; but songs of resistance can also turn into dog-whistles. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
H. Masud Taj bases his Calligraphy and Found Poem on the letter of jailed rights activist Umar Khalid, in response to a letter of Rohit Kumar, author of “Tales from the Jail: Christmas in Tihar”…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Thallumaala is an action-comedy film loaded with ‘a string/chain of fights’. Izza Ahsan reads the film dominated by the male gaze, against prevailing hyper-masculinity and homoeroticism. What does a film fuelled by testosterone with a female face that has very little to do with the plot, add up to?…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Architect, poet and calligrapher H. Masud Taj dreams of an India that might have been. His art evokes a South Asian culture that is. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
H. Masud Taj contemplates Gandhi’s last words with a Found Poem that draws an ironic and brutally honest take on our hypocrisies…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Stepwells are subterranean water structures – vavs, baulis and so on – that dot India, (especially western India) quite prolifically. The pre-modern vavs (stepwells) in Gujarat, however, are distinctive for their spatial, functional as well as ornamental refinement. Riyaz Latif ruminates on one of these structures, the exquisite stepwell at Adalaj (ca. 1499), in close proximity to Ahmadabad.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
H. Masud Taj ponders the verse “Kya pata hum mein hai kahani/Ya hain kahani mein hum?” The word “kahani” appears twice: which of the versions is true? Language is linear, one meaning follows another. Calligraphy like architecture, he holds, turns word-meanings spatial and simultaneous. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
H. Masud Taj, Toronto-based architect, poet –calligrapher, who grew up in Mumbai, India like Mayank Bhatt pays tribute through his art.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Melissa Chimera, conservationist/visual artist talks with Pat Matsueda, poet and founder of ezine Vice-Versa about her work and her concern over disconnect between human beings and the natural world that endangers both. A sample of images of art from her palette follows. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Writer, film maker, poet musician, Ronojoy Sircar’s genre-fluid artistry comes to light in these stunning images that capture the enchanting lightness of being in tones of grey. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Padmaja Challakere reviews Telugu cinema, “movies from the south” with the recent release of Sukumar’s Pushpa (2021), and S.S Rajamouli’s RRR (2022)- and one Kannada movie, KGF2. A new genre is birthing here, she avers, offering a hero with a real woundedness but also with a self-overcoming asceticism, discipline, and a sense of responsibility. Not a messianic hero, but one ordained to dignity.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In a world where apocalypse seems destined as the fate of all life, the artistic creations of Arpana Caur speak on behalf of the earth with a moral force so essential and urgently essential to embrace, says Guest Editor Alok Bhalla…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Darius Cooper, poet and author of works on Satyajit Ray and Guru Dutt remembers the birth of his passion for cinema from what he calls the golden age of world cinema screening in seventies Bombay. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In this imagined dialogue between Intizar Husain and artist Akhilesh , words and colours are like nomads transgressing boundaries with impunity. By Alok Bhalla. Paintings by Akhilesh. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Sardar Udham offers Nandini Bhattacharya the terrain to examine the concept of Ressentment as an ethical response to violations and genocide, counterposed to the prevailing discourse of forgetting nd/or forgiving crimes against humanity…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
”To see our face in the mirror we cannot move. If we do, all we see is just momentum” finds artist Nirmala Singh. An award winning painter, she uses abstraction to draw the relation between mood and motion.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Twenty years ago, Jangarh Singh Shyam, the Gond/ Pardhān artist took his own life. Akhilesh.traces his journey to fame as a sundering from “that mysterious world of Pardhān deities, which had, until then, sustained him. ” Translated by Aurogeeta Das. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Keki Daruwalla pays tribute to Raza’s preoccupation with the Bindu, the point of creation, “Prana Bindu” in Raza’s words, that marked the late painter’s ‘re-birth’ as an artist. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Coping with his existential grief as the virus, ‘malaise and mortality’, enters his home, Riyaz Latif remembers Degas’ sublime, soft lines of his Whirling Nuns. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Ink and Brush Portraits by Akbar Padamsee of the heads of prophets scarred by suffering, shying away from our compassion and yet some glow with tints of mercy …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
On International Women’s Day a salute to women at work, discovering a new sky. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Rooted and abstract, the paintings of Manish Pushkale invite calm reflection of civilisation’s legacies of spirituality, change and survival. A glimpse of his work on display starting 25th February …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Cheri Jacob K. finds that despite its inability to move beyond the logic and the cliché of the filmic/popular dominant, somewhere, right at the very end, one comes face to face with a stillness that whispers the film’s essence “Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Music from around the world that celebrates difference in musical expressions and the poetry of humankind against hate. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In this concluding part of his journey through Hindi cinema’s Nehruvian tryst, Darius Cooper finds an era of vanishing illusions, nostalgia and incipient despair
…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In this first part of his journey across Hindi cinema in post-Independent India till 1958, Darius Cooper sees Hindi films made with Nehru’s spirit of an “adaptable Occidentalism.” …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Music from marginalized peoples who are at the center of growing consciousness of other Presents, alternatives to a narrow mainstream present.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In this critical review of Satyajit Ray’s first children film made fifty years ago, Darius Cooper visits his oeuvre to offer insights into the legend’s take on music, masculinity and inter-personal relations in his films…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In this stunning history-in-the-making representation, Evita Rodrigues crowd sources visuals of women asserting a humanism India is being bulldozed into renouncing.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
What has progress wrought? Destruction of madre terra. What has unbridled power sought? Decimation of insaniyat. And yet, in this “grisly morning after…” glimpses of the future we desire.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In a world of over-representation, is it possible to experience reality without the intermediation of our conditioned existence? Murali Sivaramakrishnan thinks so; his visual expressions he contends, “are coloured by my experience of earth and by my inner feelings.” …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Perhaps the only resolution of grief over loss that can neither be shaped nor be recovered is profound melancholy that carries away every dream into emptiness. Geeta Patel on S.L. Parashar’s portraits of Partition’s victims.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In RitwikGhatak’s films, punishments and deaths move us, elicit our mourning and tears because victimization is presented in its most radical forms, says Darius Cooper in the second part of his meditation.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In Ritwik Ghatak’s films, punishments and deaths move us, elicit our mourning and tears because victimization is presented in its most radical forms, says Darius Cooper.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Anand Patwardhan offers up Vivek/Reason that reveals the shift towards fascism and the resistance to it in the last four years, in everyday life and in our institutions. It’s an epic film says Jyotsna Kapur; it places that history in the longer history of human desire for individual freedom and an egalitarian society.…[Read More]…
(Who’s Singing in the Bathroom? Sobbing at the Sink?)
Visual Spaces
The deafening emptiness of ‘Vikaas’ defines this misguided, mistreated Republic, dotted with blood-dripping embattled trees. After five years of poisoned seeds, strange fruits is all we have. And yet the light gets through the cracks……[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Loius Malle’s film first shown on TV in 1969 was frowned upon by Indian officialdom. Fifty years on, Darius Cooper finds its dialectic and dialogic magic between camera and subject still resonates. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
A visual representation of alternatives to the development model that hold out hope for a better future; compiled by Kalpavriksh.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In the two films, Darius Cooper locates the markers of spirituality to which the technology of cinema surrenders.…[Read More]…