Engaging Art - A Public Workshop on Visual Cultures

NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, BENGALURU
NGMA, Bengaluru is happy to announce its free art appreciation workshop.

Please fill up the attached registration form and mail it to ngma.bengaluru@gmail.com Seats are limited.

This workshop is designed to educate, delight and provoke anyone who is interested in looking and thinking about art. The thirteen weekly sessions are dedicated to a select group of themes which address a spectrum of ideas and issues in art. From an introduction to the basic elements of painting and sculpture including medium, perspective, form and content to various categories of art like popular and … to specific concepts like meaning, narration, beauty and politics, the workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to engage with many aspects of art making from across the world right in the centre of Bangalore, at the newly opened National Gallery of Modern Art.

The workshop will be conducted by four faculty: the artist and writer Ravikumar Kashi, artist and teacher Ramesh Chandra, designer and art historians Annapurna Garimella and Lina Vincent Sunish.

SCHEDULE OF SESSIONS

Sun, July 10, 10 AM - 11.30 AM
Process of looking, perceiving, interpreting in everyday life: How our sensibilities respond to the visuals around us. This lecture will explore the mechanism of looking, perceiving and interpreting and the gray areas of perception. It will also contextualize looking by discussing the visual literacy of the average person in our context, visual reading as it develops from the childhood by analyzing text book illustrations, comic books etc.

Sun, July 10, 11.30 AM - 1 PM
Visual sensibilities of folk and urban folk culture and living with visuals – This session covers the everyday and alternative imaginary world and how it attempts to “communicate the incommunicable” through speech, sound and image, visual practices in relation to religion, rituals & festivals and images of faith, acceptance and worship such as religious sculptures in urban popular culture.

Ravikumar Kashi Aesthetics and Meaning Making

Sat, July 16, 4 - 5.30 PM
Making meaning in art – There is a distinct quality to visual language when compared to verbal language. Art works to bridge the gap between artist and the viewer. This session will examine the process of coding – decoding inherent in visual communication and how context - cultural, geographical, and political - provides meaning, fixed and ambiguous, which expands and breaches the accepted boundaries. Association, cropping, distortion and scale as tools of meaning generation will also be discussed as well as the different stages - recognition, understanding and gaining insight – by engaging with art.

Sat, July 16, 5.30 - 7 PM
Narrative structures and strategies: Different narrative structures and strategies are employed in visual art. The session will reflect time, movement and emphasis and explore the interrelationship between content of the art work and narrative strategy. Also part of the discussion is the reconstruction of the real in a work of art. How this is achieved in different forms of visual art such as easel painting, mural painting, installation, performance, video? What narrative strategies do these employ? The lecture will also provide comparison and examine the relationship of visual art with other art forms.

Sun, July 17, 10 - 11.30 AM
Abstract and Concrete: Art is both concrete and abstract. It carries suggestion as well as statement. This session will look at the power of suggestion. Through comparisons with novels and poetry, the lecture will look at the aesthetics and processes of meaning-making in the expressions of abstract content through concrete imagery. How do different mediums yield to this process by coming together or juxtaposing of different imagery to creating suggestive meaning? Of particular interest for the discussion will be various stages and degrees of abstraction and the interrelationship between understanding of suggested meaning and the context of the work.

Lina Vincent Sunish Collecting Art

Sun, July 17, 11.30 AM - 1 PM
Understanding art mediums (painting, drawing, sculpture, print, film/video, new media): Mediums are diverse in contemporary art practice. People visiting an art display are usually curious about whether a work is made on canvas or paper, and have questions about the manner in which different mediums are used by artists. This session discusses the various mediums of art in detail, their differences and commonalities and the way they can be combined. The lecture will also discuss edition art such as lithographs, etchings, and woodcuts, also photographs and digital prints. A short introduction to the idea of new media and installation art will conclude the presentation. Finally, there will be a short introduction to the display, maintenance and conservation of art for collectors and anyone who seeks to live with art.

Sat, July 23, 4 - 5.30 PM
The art market: This session covers the pricing of art work, and art as an investment. It also will address the functioning of the Indian art market, in major art hubs such as Mumbai and Delhi as well as in smaller centers such Bangalore, Chennai and Cochin and analyze the differences within these markets. The session will end with an overview of gallery functioning, auction systems and art fairs fom the buyer’s perspective.

Sat, July 23, 5.30 - 7 PM
Folk, Craft and Urban Contemporary Art - Various folk and tribal arts are now entering the mainstream urban art network, through individual practitioners of the art forms. Most people are familiar with a variety of these forms that are produced in abundance for craft melas and sometimes in the form of utility items designed with folk aesthetics. There are now subtle lines of difference between craft and folk arts which influence their valuation and pricing. There are specific histories for these art forms which the lecture will present in order to help the prospective connoisseur of art to understand this area of the art market and enter it with confidence.

Annapurna Garimella The Art Experience

Sun, July 24, 10 - 11.30 AM
Primitive and Classical: “Primitive” and “classical” are words used to evaluate, classify and rank art and its makers. This session will explore the processes by which art is evaluated and judged and what these terms make visible and invisible when we look at art.

Sun, July 24, 11.30 AM - 1 PM
Beauty: For many, the experience of “beauty” is the goal of viewing art. The session will first explore the creation of such an experience and then examine what other experiences are available in an engagement with a work of art.

Sat, July 30, 4 - 7 PM
Pleasure: Looking at and thinking about art is closely related to deriving pleasure. This session will explore how art works and artists define and engender pleasure for the viewer and how pleasure motivates art making. An important segment of the discussion will also focus on the relationship between the experience of visual pleasure and the idea that art should have a purpose.

A wrap up discussion with all the course instructors will conclude this segment of the course.

Ramesh Chandra

Sun, July 31, 10 AM - 1 PM
Art Making – a practical session