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Colourful
Klaus
 Viewers
who recently went to the Stuttgart Hall Foyer, Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai,
were left bewildered. They'd come to see a German artist's reinterpretation
of the Ramayana but were instead figuring out the connection between 54-year-old
Klaus Ritterbusch's shadowy sepia drawings and the familiar tale about
good surmounting evil. While Klaus claims to have been inspired by Javanese-Balinese
portrayals of the Ramayana in their culture, the problem about interpretation
arose because no one bothered to read Klaus' manual at the visitor's table.
So the animal-humanoid
forms and Holi-like splashes were actually themes like "Rama continues
his work in the unknown cave". Unfortunately, the artist wasn't around
to tell everyone that the narration was a pretext to portray his own autobiography,
and that Rama is shown as an artist who within his lifetime, seeks to
gain recognition of his new, epochal work from reluctant, conservative
critics. Not many would have guessed that.
-Natasha
Israni
Sound
Platform
For
Shail, son of industralist Abhey Oswal, his new album Kahan Hai Tu is
a love poem. For his family, the album means "diversification",
from manufacturing chemicals and fertilisers to making music and movies.
So what if it's almost as if the 22-year-old's family launched an entertainment
company, Lucky Star Entertainment Ltd, in April last year, just in time
to release, promote and distribute the young scion's second music album.
At least he's got a what he calls a "sound platform" to begin
with. Oswal's first brush with commercial music was an indipop album called
Hello (distributed by Magnasound) that he produced last year with "good
friend" and music composer Biddu who goaded him to cut an album after
watching him perform at a London show. But Kahan Hai Tu (composed by Biddu
with one song Tera chehra penned by forgotten Pakistani singer Zoheb Hassan),
is, says Oswal, "a mix of ballads, indipop, reggae, rock, techno,
with a lot of 'aalaps' and 'Hinglish' thrown in." What's with the
title though? The young singer coos: "My songs extol love. Very difficult
to find true love these days."
-Methil
Renuka
Couple
of Contrasts
 Fire
and Exploration, a pictorially out-of-turn series by painter couple Altaf
and Navjot at the Prithvi Art Gallery in Mumbai is a celebration of contrasts-the
fire of love, hate, ambition and passion against the personal exploration
of consciousness. And with Navjot, who has shifted from wooden sculptures
to installations to mixed media, the change is more apparent. "Exploration"
for her has meant a visual journal of her life over the past two years
in the backwoods of Bastar and consists of photocopied dairy entries,
snaps of friends, parts of human anatomy and her own pictures shot by
friends.
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| Altaf
with Navjot (top left); Altaf's canvas |
In comparison
58-year-old Altaf's work, being displayed with his wife's after a hiatus
of seven years, sticks to its largely nonexperimental mediums and forms.
"But I have made a shift by representing my themes in a less figurative
way so that they haven't lost their effectiveness," he adds. Works
just as well. (The exhibition will shift to the Guild Gallery in Colaba
after January 14 for those who refuse to travel to the suburbs.)
-Himanshi
Dhawan
 LANDED
WITH GLORY: Looks like Delhi's School of Planning and Architecture
is a study in contrasts-talented students working within an aesthetically
deplorable building. Recently four students, Anirban Pal, Deepika Arora,
Pooja Bansal and K. Senthil Kumar (above) won the UNESCO prize for Landscape
Architecture 2000 for their project, Baz Bahadur Palace, Roopmati's Pavilion.
The quartet upstaged contenders from over 35 countries for the US $ 3,500
top prize-a part of UNESCO's efforts to promote eco-tourism.
Trance
About
He's a New
Age groove god who gets the crowd going wild. Tel Aviv deejay Rami Shapira,
28, and his band Chakra gave some 3,000 Mumbaiikars a taste of "real"
electronic music at a pre-New Year party organised by Shaw Wallace at
The Leela. Shapira performed live with guitarist Romen Reznik and drummer
Erez Koskas amid giant screen multimedia effects, mini-lasers, scanners
and strobes. And they managed to recreate the underground techno-trance-house
look to near perfection-the entire venue was transformed into dramatic
zones with fluorescent 3-D cut-outs, large paintscapes of tantra art,
psychedelic meditating men, random abstract forms and décor pieces.
The music, a blend of trance, rock, jazz, classical, house and the blues
(even a jugalbandi between the drummer and guitarist), went down well
with the crowd that included everyone from venture capitalists and dotcommers
to models, like Inder Sudan and veejay Suchitra Pillai. Seems like Mumbai's
now hooked on trance.
-Natasha
Israni
Scamps'
golf camp: It's a noble thought. Ravissant man Vishal Chawla
wants "golf to be accessible to every kid in this country",
so he's put together the first golf NGO in India: Junior Golf Foundation.
The first session, held in the school winter break saw some 30 enthusiastic
10-year-olds battling the early morning chill to play at Delhi's Air Force
Club in Chanakyapuri. Future plans for JGF? "Scout for real talent
and sponsor them to play internationally," says Chawla. Good coaches,
regular sessions with top professionals ... this just might work.
-Leher
Kala
Top
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METRO TODAY
As
the Government brings in more people and mops more money in taxes, it
must be seen to be rewarding those who come forth and pay up, writes India
Today Associate Editor V. Shankar Aiyar in 