This city is built on a strong base of diversity! Fashion designers, musicians, dancers, creative thinkers, you name it, and I am sure our city has one to offer. And one factor all of them hoard is a heart of gold.
Coming together to help those affected by the floods in the North East, artists from across the city will be presenting their works in Social, Church Street, from September 21 to 23. Proceeds from the silent auction of visual art will be sent to the Chief Minister’s Distress Relief Fund.
Twenty- six artworks from six different artists will be displayed here with Rs 1000 as base price.
Shobita Kadan, director marketing & strategy for Social, says “We’ve seen the art community putting their works for sale by themselves, using the power of social media, in order to raise funds for disaster relief. During September and October, this Silent Auction will be held across Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, Delhi and Chandigarh. The aim is to contribute for the North East Flood Relief while supporting independent visual artists from across the country.”
Vibhav’s The Sound of Creation
Artists who will be displaying their works are equally excited. The auction will provide them with a platform to interact with people about their creations. We talk to a few of the artists who will be displaying their works to find out what we can expect.
Samresh Shrivastava, a student of visual communication, says, “There is a subconscious sense of identity and self-portrayed nature of my work that comes out through every material I explore. In this auction there are three different materials that I am putting up; a charcoal exploration, a marker and pen exploration, and a brush pen exploration. All of them have the same theme; Identity and self-portrait. I love it when I get responses for my work, it is always special. They tend to point out something I never even thought of when I was making it. It’s always an eye opener to see how many different ways something can be looked at and how many different ways people relate to something in ways so different from mine. But most of all, I’m really happy I will be able to contribute to the cause.”
With a mixed emotion of excitement and anxiety overtaking him, Sachin Bhatt, a student from Srishti School of Design, is prepping to showcase his works. “I am presenting a collection which, I believe, represents me. I didn’t follow a theme for my paintings because I wanted to provide a mixed variety that will go with the works of other artists too. I will be presenting five of my works and my favourite has to be the one with a man in the toilet with a health faucet held against his head. People today respond to a lot of things with violence, I have taken a sarcastic dig at this mentality through this painting. I’m excited to see how people respond to our works considering we are all young and upcoming artists,” he says.
After receiving unprecedented rainfall in the last few weeks, Nagaland met the same fate as Kerala and Coorg. It has led to the death of 12 and displaced over 3,000 families. About 359 locations have been completely cut off.
Nandana Saika, a student from St. Joseph’s who hails from Assam says, “Some parts were severely affected. I had relatives who were stranded in their buildings for hours together before anyone could reach out to them. It was sad to see the government and media turning a blind eye to their struggle; like it really didn’t matter. But the responses and help we received from people around was heartwhelming. It felt good to see that humanity still exists.”
