About the artists

[en]counters - powerPLAY January 2013

Kay Abude I Mansi Bhatt I Clara Cheung I Gum Cheung I Wai Ian Chung Vibha Galhotra I Reena Kallat I Fung Lee I Mee Ping Leung I Chi Kit Lo Tobias Megerle I Pietro Pirelli I PVI Collective Sharmila Samant I The Red Swing Project I The Telepathy Project

Kay Abude, Production Line

Kay Abude is a sculptor living and working in Melbourne. She completed a Master of Fine Art (by Research) at the Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts and Music, The University of Melbourne in 2010. Her art practice is a hybrid of drawing, object making, photography, film, installation, costume and performance. Central themes within Abude’s labour intensive art practice include repetition, time and endurance that run parallel to the triad of art, life and work. Abude takes a task-orientated approach to acts of making, staging highly aestheticised installations within durational performance.

Kay will be presenting a new, culturally-specific version of her performance-installation Production Line, where four performers work with locally sourced textiles, fashioning interpretations of Indian currency in a series of workstations. The performance will be situated in the public sphere in the Carter Road area of , linking the project to the two historically important economies of the city, the sea front and textile industries. The general public, and traders involved in sourcing the materials incorporated in the work, are invited to participate in the process of ‘making money’.

Mansi Bhatt, NO MORAL

Mansi Bhatt was born in 1975 in Gujarat, India. She holds a BFA in Painting from the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai. Bhatt’s work has been described as ‘performative photography’ that lends itself to sculptural and cinematic transformation. Mansi Bhatt’s work locates itself within the world of performance and photography. The characters that she inhabits in her work are drawn from a combination of reality and fiction. Her practice has evolved over the last ten years and has included solo shows in India and the United States as well as residencies at various spaces including the renowned Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh in 2007 and The Watermill Center in New York in 2005.

This year at [en]counters, the artist, will perform NO MORAL, a bridal run(a)way to the sunset skies on the ‘abhay setu’(the stoneway near titan tower). She will invite people to join her performance. Clara Cheung, Symphony of Mumbai Sea Water

Graduated at Rhodes College (TN, USA) with double majors in Fine Art and Computer Science in 2002, Clara Cheung studied for the Postgraduate Diploma in Education at the Chinese University of afterwards, and received a master degree of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She has been the head of the visual arts department in a high school from 2003 to 2007, is currently an active member of the non-profit art group, Project226,the founder of C&G Artpartment, and a part- time lecturer at Hong Kong Baptist University. She has co-curated many art exhibitions at C&G Artpart- ment and organizes various art projects for other local organizations or schools. Having had different solo and group exhibitions in Hong Kong and overseas, she explores with different art media in her art- making, and some of her works have been collected by private collectors and art museums.

Cheung will display a work entitled Bombay Symphony at [en]counters 2013. Bombay Symphony will encourage the community to work together in an eco-friendly fashion. Plastic bottles collected from the neighboruhood will be attached to a light-box. Passersby are invited to pour Bombay’s seawater into the plastic bottles in order to light up the LEDs which in turn will light up Mumbai’s cityscape.

Gum Cheung, Gum Can Dance in India

Gum was born in Hong Kong. In 1998, Gum completed the social work programme at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He graduated with distinction of Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) in Drawing, at RMIT University in 2002. In 2007, Gum received M.A. in Comparative and Public History from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is a registered social worker, part-time lecturer of the Hong Kong Art School, founder of C & G Artpartment, chairman of a Hong Kong non-profit art group “Project 226”. Since 2000, he has curated more than 100 art exhibitions, educational programme, seminars, exchange programme etc. His curatorial directions mainly criticize politics, social issues and art eco-system. His artworks explore various media, like painting, drawing, performance, stop-motion animation, photography, video and installation.

For [en]counters 2013, the artist will experience and re-generate the energy of India through dance.

Vibha Galhotra, River Sewer

Vibha Galhotra was born in 1978 and obtained an MFA in Printmaking at Kala Bhavan Centre for Visual Art, Santiniketan and BFA in Printmaking at the Government College of Arts, Chandigarh. She received the INLAKS Foundation Fine Arts Award in 2003, a National Scholarship from the Government of India and the ‘Artist Under 30 Years’ Award from the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi. Vibha has held several solo shows of her work in India and participated in group exhibitions in India and abroad. Her work is in the collection of Casoria International Contemporary Art Museum, Casoria, Italy, and several public and private collections.

The work being shown at [en]counters 2013 is a continuation of the artist’s exploration of Indian rivers and water ways. She will spend four to five days following a 15 km stretch of the Mithi river collecting sediment, and researching local fishing techniques. The final installation will be large sculptures made out of river sediments, latex, and fishing nets along with large bamboo structures. The process, documentation and photographs will also be displayed at Carter Road Promenade.

Reena Kallat, Podium/Cube

Reena Saini Kallat (b. 1973, Delhi, India) graduated from Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai in 1996 with a B.F.A. in painting. Her practice – spanning painting, photography, video, sculpture and installation, often incorporates multiple mediums into a single work. She frequently works with officially recorded or registered names of people, objects, and monuments that are lost or have disappeared without a trace, only to get listed as anonymous and forgotten statistics. One of the recurrent motifs in her work is the rubber stamp, used as an object and an imprint, signifying the bureaucratic apparatus, which both confirms and obscures identities.

The wooden sculpture comprising twenty pieces that fit together to form a cube is made of sections that simulate sport-podiums. Arranged within the stable geometry and universal order of the cube, these podiums however are set in flux with their jumbled numbering and levels, ranking, grading and hierarchy gone awry; ideas of success and accomplishment reshaped to re-configure the victory stand into a plaything.

Tobias Megerle, Levitate Yourself

Born in 1970 in Huefingen, Germany, Megerle completed his undergraduate degree from Cologne University. Tobias is an artist, but that does not stop him from dabbling in science or anything else that interests him. In fact, he calls himself a dilettante. Whilst living in Germany, he taught art for nine years, before moving to Mumbai in 2009. As part of [en]counters 2013, the artist will create a levitating seat – a device where those who sit on it appear to levitate. Passersby will be invited to take photos as they become part of the work itself. Pietro Pirelli, Mumbai Traffic Flowers

Pietro Pirelli, born in Rome in 1954, is a performer and composer for acoustic and electronic instruments, for theatre, ballett, art exhibitions, installations, film and video. He is the founder of Agon, a cultural association dealing with acoustics, informatics and music, of which he is now president. He worked, among others, for the Living Theatre of New York, Festival MUSICA of Strasbuorg, Festival Goteborg, Ars Ludi, Egri Bianco Danza, Philipphe Daverio, Telecom Progetto Italia, Arte Fiera Bologna and many more. In 2003 he met the sardinian sculptor Pinuccio Sciola and began to explore the extraordinary musical qualities of his “Pietre Sonore”. The artist creates a connection between sound, light and water to generate visual melodies.

He will record everyday noises and sounds in the city, which will then be connected to a surface containing water and crossed by a light. The surface, reacting and moving with the sound waves, will then create luminous shapes on the surface itself.

Mee Ping Leung, Made in India

Mee Ping Leung received her BFA from L’Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts a , France and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts, LA, U.S.A and Ph.D at Chinese University of Hong Kong (Religious & Cultural Studies Department). Her art work genres include mixed media, video, multimedia installation and site-specific event-based project. Mee Ping’s works examine daily life through perception of daily life itself. Currently a lecturer at the Academy of Visual Art, Baptist University of Hong Kong. Leung has participated in numerous solo and joint exhibitions in Hong Kong and abroad. Exhibitions included the “Hong Kong Art Biennial Exhibition”, “Hong Kong Contemporary - Water Tone: Leung Mee-ping”, “City net Asia 2003”, the “ Biennale”, “Asian Traffic”, “Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia” and “Hers Shorts: 1st Annual Women’s International Video Festival”.

She will conduct a one day workshop involving clay shaping at Horniman Circle. The artist will bring with her 30 pieces of daily objects “made-in-India” from Hong Kong, and will invite people to shape the outlook of that object into clay form. This is an encounter of materials and the exchange process of restoring. The interactive process will be documented live and the clay objects will be on display following the workshop.

PVI Collective, Resist

Founded in 1998, as an independent artists group and based in Perth, western Australia, pvi collective create tactical media artworks that seek out radical, darkly humorous solutions for living in an unstable twenty first century. PVI Collective, Resist (continued)

Incorporating elements of performance, visual art and intervention, works are often highly participatory, physically demanding, site responsive and politically charged. The group have toured extensively throughout Australia with critically acclaimed tactical media performance tts: Australia and internationally with their site-specific panopticon & reform bodies of work including , & Germany.

In 2006 the group represented was part of the South projects international arts gathering in Santiago, Chile and were selected to exhibit in the prestigious primavera at the mca Sydney; in 2008 pvi were key-note speakers at next wave festival and featured video dyptich resist as part of the human rights arts festival in Melbourne.

PVI Collective will be working with the local Mumbai community around Juhu Beach to create a new version of their renown work Resist, a participatory performance work that invites audiences to step up and champion a cause using the ancient art of tug-of-war. Over the course of three hours, participants of all ages publically wage war one-on-one with the PVI conflict resolution team over a series of con- tentious issues that have the community divided, using only a 10m length of rope, their physical prowess and the spirit of their own convictions.

Sharmila Samant, Project for a Mankhurd Library

Born in Bombay in 1967, the Indian artist Sharmila Samant lives and works in the city now known as Mumbai. Her fine art education at Sir J.J. School of Art was followed by a diploma in interior design. Samant uses a multi-disciplinary approach, working in photography, installation and video. Samant’s work deals with issues of identity within a global context, particularly looking at the homogenising effect of commodification in relation to developing economies. She spent four years in Europe from 1998 when she was resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and in London at Gasworks. The experience of transition and being an outsider sharpened her position as an artist who offers a powerful critique on the market forces that define cultural practices of peripheral nations.

The artist would like to create an open thinking space in the form of a library in Mankhurd district where she has been involved in community based and artistic projects for several years. She will conduct two field trips for architecture students to the area where they will discuss the geographical, historical aspects of the place. This will be followed by a site visit to the space that the community has demarcated for their library which a few students will be selected to design. The artist will then organize a discussion at StudioX Gallery involving activists, historians, environmentalists and a geologist working in the area together with the local representatives of the community. The discussion is an incubator by which the project for the library will be defined. Different perspectives of how the project is The Red Swing Project

The Red Swing Project strives to positively impact under-utilized public spaces with simple red swings. The Red Swing Project started in February 2007 as an urban intervention within the city of Austin, Texas and since, over 150 red swings have been hung in USA, India, Thailand, Brasil, Taiwan, South Korea, France, Spain, Portugal, Haiti, Venice and Poland. The swings are made of red painted wood and hung using retired rock climbing rope. The artist is going to set up unexpected playgrounds in locations throughout the city.

The Telepathy Project, Dreaming the Arabian Sea

Australian based artists Sean Peoples and Veronica Kent have spent the last five years developing a critical practice based on the possibilities of telepathic communication. Telepathy serves as an extended metaphor and working methodology through which they explore alternate ways of being, communicating and collaborating, and acts as the premise for the setting up of encounters that test and provoke such relationships. These projects have been realised throughout Australia and overseas in public, university and Artist Run spaces.

The Mumbai dream telepathy project explores alternative routes, dream and telepathic communica- tion via an event Sean and Veronica will be creating on the city’s waterfront: the texts of their songs and the costumes and props used in the event will be inspired by the dreams that the couple will make during their stay in India, and the performance will be given to real and imaginary audiences both in Mumbai and on the other side of the Arabian Sea.

Wai Ian Chung, A Line

Wai Ian Chung (b.1987) is a Hong Kong contemporary artist. She graduated from Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University in 2009. After studies, she was a project coordinator in Woofer Ten Artspace until 2011. Her sculptures have been showed in Hong Kong, and .

During the first stage of the project, the artist will collect traditional tales and ghost stories from the Koli village on Carter Road. The artist will then paint the boats of the fisherman which tell these stories. She will also paint the floor of the Carter Road Promenade. Using luminous paints, the stories will illuminate the Promenade after dark. Chi Kit Lo, Stars

Chi Kit Lo (b. 1983) obtained his BA degree in Fine Arts from RMIT University. His artworks are mostly conceptual based. In Lo¡œs artist career, he continues to explore various media within different social context. Lo is currently living and working in Hong Kong.

The artist has a map of a certain neighborhood, and strolls in that location. As he encounters people, he collects hand drawn stars from passersby. He then creates a new map with these hand drawn stars. He turns this map of stars into a projection within the neighborhood. This projection is a gift to those who live in the city and haven’t seen a sky full of stars for a long time. It will be on view at StudioX Gallery.

Lee Chun-Fung

Lee Chun-Fung is an artist and independent curator based in Hong Kong. He is among the founding members of Community art space: Woofer Ten. He hosts a weekly art critique programme in the radio station FM101.

For schedule details visit www.asiaartprojects.com/powerplay // www.artoxygen.org For further details and images contact [email protected] // +919820437988

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria, and the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Australian residency partner Last Ship, Mumbai.