Charmi Gada Shah recipient of FICA Emerging Artist Award 2011

ART AWARD WINNERS INDIAN ARTISTS

A top jury that included artist Bharti Kher and curator Sunil Gupta has selected Mumbai-based installation artist Charmi Gada Shah as the winner of the 2011 Emerging Artist Award, initiated in 2007 by the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA).

Charmi Gada Shah, 'Still-life of a landscape', 2010, ceramic. Image courtesy artist.

From the press release:

The Emerging Artist Award is one of the three annual support programmes offered by FICA. Initiated in 2007, it seeks to promote young artists studying or practicing in India who demonstrate extraordinary skill and promise in the visual arts. The EAA 2011 is presented in collaboration with Pro Helvetia-Swiss Arts Council, New Delhi, and Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, with additional support from Ms Shalini Passi.

On being selected as the recipient of EAA 2011, Shah will receive a ninety-day residency in Switzerland in summer 2012, and a solo exhibition at the Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, in August 2013.

The Jury: Shah was selected by a jury that consisted of artist Bharti Kher, curator Gayatri Sinha, photographer and curator Sunil Gupta, Chandrika Grover of Pro Helvetia-Swiss Arts Council in collaboration with Swiss curator Nadia Schneider Willen, and Radhika Chopra and Vidya Shivadas of FICA. The jury was impressed with Shah’s proficiency in handling material, space and scale, her versatility when it came to working with different environments, and her commitment to research. They also found the dominant themes of change, loss of memory and the question of erasure relevant to contemporary conditions in life and art.

Charmi Gada Shah (b. 1980) completed her Bachelor’s in Fine Arts (Drawing and Painting) from the L.S. Raheja School of Art, Mumbai, and her post-graduate degree from Chelsea College of Art, London. In 2009 she received the Art India Promising Artist Award. She has exhibited in group shows including “The Staircase Project” at Kashi Art Residency, Cochin (2008), “Relative Visa” (2009), “Her Work is Never Done” (2010), curated by Bose Krishnamachari, Mumbai, and “Generation in Transition: New art from India”, curated by Magda Kardasz at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2011). She has been shown at Art Gwangju, Korea, by Gallery BMB (2010), and Prague Biennale 5 – India Pavilion, curated by Kanchi Mehta (2011). She lives and works in Mumbai.

Shah’s practice engages with the passage of time and the subsequent shifts that have occurred in the meaning and function of architecture. She often works with built spaces that are invariably either abandoned, neglected or in a state of disuse; through the process of revisiting them, and building or innovating on their outlines, Shah draws attention back to these spaces and their disjuncture in time and space. Employing different media, including drawing, sculpture, photography, film and architecture, she formulates a network of correlations that play on notions of memory, destruction and conservation. The works, as installations, become in-situ repositories of documentation, fiction and mimesis.

KN/HH

Related Topics: Indian artists, art prizes, installation art