Off to a great start

The Krishnakriti Festival 2018 kicked off on a high note on Thursday evening with a gallery packed with eminent artists and art connoisseurs from the country. This year’s festival is doubly special because it is the 15th edition of the initiative by the Kalakriti art gallery and the Lahoti Foundation. The theme of the four-day festival is Cartography or mapping. The curator of one of the exhibitions titled Mapping Frontiers, Lina Vincent Suresh said, “The artists have not just interpreted the maps of geography but those that go on in one’s mind, anatomy or even in the cosmos.” On Thursday, two exhibits, Mapping Frontiers and Mapping the city, curated by Lina and Nirmala Biluka respectively, were spread over Goethe Zentrum, Kalakriti Art Gallery and the Gallery Café. 

After the lighting of the lamp, Rahul Somani, brother-in-law of Rekha Lahoti spoke about how the family came up with the venture. It was very interesting to see how each one of the 30 artists who presented their work, interpreted the idea of mapping. While some artists played with the idea on cloth, like Nidhi Khurana, others such as Avijit Dutta put up installations. Titled Fragrances, his installation is over a 100-year-old bed, and the cot and bed sheets are carved out of wood. On it, there are black ants made of metal. The artwork was a dialogue on the partition of Bengal, something that has been close to the artist’s home.

Two of the guests, Leo and Sabastian, are from Germany and are travelling the world only on land, without taking any flights. They entered India through Pakistan, after crossing the border. “We came to Hyderabad and we looked for Goethe Zentrum. It is interesting because we have been mapping our way since the past 10 months and here we are, at an art festival about mapping!”

The rest of the festival is dotted with workshops, exhibitions and heritage walks across the city.