TAKE on art - Issue 13, 2014
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Issue 13, 2014 issue Digital Access. 
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In this issue
The central theme of the forthcoming issue, guest-edited by cultural theorist and curator Nancy Adajania, and edited by Bhavna Kakar, is the Sacred. It deals with a complex question that people fear to address: In a society where the intelligentsia are wary of religious experience, while political forces instrumentalise religion through the politics of identity, is it possible to discuss the sacred as a source of regeneration? TAKE/ Sacred will reflect critically on the resources of the sacred and the varied interpretations it has received from artists, architects, sociologists, poets, historians, theorists and other actors in the cultural domain; the focus will be on the visual arts and their relationship to other cultural articulations. TAKE/ Sacred includes a number of special contributions by eminent Art critics, Theorists, Poets, Architects, anthropologists and artists exploring this tendentious theme like Nikos Papastergiadis, Hammad Nassar, Ala Younis, Nancy Adajania, Nilima Sheikh, Anita Dube, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Ram Rahman, Baiju Parthan, Agung Hujatnikajennong, Vivek Menezes, Lina Vincent Sunish, Valsan Koorma Kolleri, Deepika Sorabjee, Neha Choksi, Smita and Mustansir Dalvi, Gieve Patel, Ranjit Hoskote, Rudi Heredia, Kaiwan Mehta, Wael Shawky, Valsan Koorma Also, we have our book and exhibition reviews and regular columns by Nivedita Magar, Himali Singh Soin, Rosalyn D'mello, Anushka Rajendran, Sujata Assomul Sippy, Georgina Maddox, Manisha Gera Baswani, Pushpamala N, Bhavna Kakar and Hemant Sareen.
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Falling In Love (Again): India's Weaves Story
India’s love affair with handwoven cloth shows no signs of abating. Open any fashion magazine or newspaper and weaves get ample play. Designers up and down the country extol the virtues of weaves, proudly brandishing their innovative work with weavers to contemporise motifs and palettes. This is laudable but hardly surprising.
Regal Renaissance: The Royal Opera House Re-opens
The Royal Opera House Mumbai is widely touted as ‘Mumbai’s cultural crown jewel’ and India’s only surviving opera house. The original idea for the space was conceived of in 1908. It was inaugurated in 1911 by King George V, and eventually completed in 1916. The design incorporated a blend of European and Indian detailing.
Technologies Of Elegance
As soon as you enter the exhibition space in Bikaner House, the display ahead sort of takes your breath away. It’s a carefully crafted mise-enscène, filled with dangling screens, suspended sequins, overflowing jewellery boxes, glass displays, and more. And yet, in spite of the exquisite setting, and the props that inhabit it, your focus never wavers from the clothes, which form the essence of the exhibition.
Fictioning The Landscape: Robert Smithson And Ruins In Reverse
That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is – all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. –Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey”
Kerala Boy
The Kerala boy stands alone, facing the sea or what looks like the sea. Water is never far from his feet. His eyes are dark and his hair is blacker than the best Tellicherry pepper. He is an inch taller than most and a little long in the tooth. He likes the language of protest. He likes the flavour of a season called ‘Left’.
Ghosts Of Ghan-Town
Landing gracefully on a rock, the camel tucked in its wings And wondered if this was perhaps Miryam Springs? This parched and desolate landscape was not what he hoped to find What of the flourishing settlement he had once left behind?
Delicate Animals
The humidity is sabotage and my skin is undone. I’ve always had a preference for dryness. While other women fear wrinkles, I never mind the beginnings of a crease. They seem cleaner, those intersecting lines. But then I’ve never been afraid of getting older, of being an abstraction.
The Smuggler: A Mural By Sadequain
The story goes that Sadequain (1930 – 1987), living in Karachi, was exhausted and in poor health. He was offered a stay at a government rest house at Gadani in 1958, so that he could recover. Gadani is located in the province of Balochistan on the Arabian Sea, a few kilometers west of Karachi. It must have felt quite remote from the city back then. The western coastline of Pakistan has long been infamous for underdevelopment and for unregulated trade activities with West Asia.
Complete Love
It’s 2011, late summer. All over Europe, young people are occupying central public squares to demonstrate for more social justice. In Berlin, their agenda is different. The completists gathered at Alexanderplatz aspire for justice primarily on an intimate level. They believe that only when the redistribution of material wealth includes equal chances of finding sex and love — no matter how elderly, disabled, or ugly you are — communism will become real.
A Writer's Discourse
There are two moments in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus that I come back to often. The first is an epitaph that Socrates uses to explain bad writing, which he recites (and I will now quote) in full:
