INA KAUR
When Ina Kaur resorts to bricolage during the lockdown, making her own paper, putting together earlier prints and other things lying around in her studio from previous works, it immediately brings to mind a store of associations: grandmoms turning out new delicacies from fridge leftovers, womanly thrift giving new life to worn saris as exquisite kanthas (cotton rugs), transforming torn clothes into sumptuous patchwork quilts. Domestic creativity has, traditionally, been reinventing discards into new avatars long before postmodern thought gave a contemporary spin to an engagement that has always been part of cultural evolution. It’s an intriguing personal parole through which debris becomes design for Kaur. Just as the collage counters illusion, declaring its process of becoming in its unfinished look, accident is chaperoned by intent in Kaur’s works to stress what can be called an undressed, unbidden immediacy. Not surprisingly, therefore, a disarming intimacy informs them.
A kind of confessional, unmonitored randomness that indicates an internal, unstructured monologue meandering through search, recall, pause in the print — as mirrored by this bricolage series — Disentangled. As though her musings were in drift, wrapping around her mind and being loosely mapped, their different strands roaming free in different directions, looping back, disappearing into silence, returning with fresh vigour, getting knotted, wandering off again.
In the other series, Perception, which combines etching, relief and stencil, circular bands, singly or in concentric sets, seem to have torn away from dynamic tapestries of sentient, intertwining loops, into self-contained little patterns that still archly refer to each other, often as complementary excerpts, as the unit and the whole area in a symbiotic interface. A union which readily suggests the uneasy relationship that the individual shares with the group.
What’s to be noted is that the shape anchoring the patterns in both sets is the orb which actually has a very practical reason: the embroidery hoop the artist confines them in. But the circle, echoing an organic shape in nature, has neither a beginning nor a break, and this suggests diachronic continuity and synchronic interconnectedness: a perpetual dialectic of the old appropriated by the new; the particular emerging out of but tethered to the general.
A look at the artist’s earlier sets— with their cellular squiggles, sensuous filaments, skeins of tangling loops — reveals an abiding existential concern that’s confirmed by the titles themselves: Remnants, Traces, Acceptance and Letting Go, and so forth, that uncover a process of coming to terms with the past, as uncharted paths fade, float, dangle sinuously, hinting at a refrain of recollections, as it were. This sense of shifts — in memory and therefore in Time — permeates her present works, as well.
The palette in both sets is pale: greys and beige, with touches of white and brown. This evokes a curious sense of immateriality, of the evanescence of Time and the tenuousness of space as these slip beyond an individual’s reckoning, perhaps carrying scraps of one’s evolved identity into ellipses, into the irretrievable loss of little bits of one’s past and, with it, the little bits of the self-invested in them, therefore.
These paths are fundamental to Kaur’s art, looping and tangling, fading and reclaimed. The metaphor of a journey is reinforced because, in Disentangled, they resemble railway lines. But this notional journey appears as a quest, an endless, relentless, meditative quest: the journey, the quest, seems to have no object, no arrival. Because, yes, the quest itself is the destination.
Rita Datta,
Art Critic,
Kolkata, June 2020
Click images for enlargement
Title: Perception
Medium: Etching, relief and stencil (set of 10pcs)
Size: 50cm x 48cm (each) Year: 2019
Title: Disentangled
Medium: Print bricolage and graphite drawing on handmade paper (set of 28)
Size: 20cm diameter approx. (each) Year: 2020
Title: Together Apart
Medium: Intaglio print on handmade paper
Size: 38.1cm diameter (each) Year: 2018
Title: Apart Together
Medium: Intaglio print on handmade paper
Size: 38.1cm diameter (each) Year: 2018
Born: 1980
Education
2007: MFA with Distinction, Studio Art, Purdue University, West Lafayette
2004: Post Baccalaureate, MSU Faculty of Fine Art, Baroda
2003: BFA with Distinction, Printmaking, Punjab University, Chandigarh
Solo Exhibitions
2018: A Declaration, Home Sweet Home, Bangalore Beyond, Kunstraum Alternative Spaces of Art, Koln
2016: Entangled, Fine Arts Gallery, UW-Marinette, Marinette Introductions 2016, Davidson Galleries, Seattle
2013: Ink Link, Fine Art Gallery, Ybor City, Tampa Decode Encode, Scarabocchio Art Museum, Steven Point Gathering, Overbrook Art Gallery, Muskegon
2012: Ink Ensemble, Gallery 501, Tampa
2011: Superficial Encryption(s), Mehrangarh Museum Gallery, Jodhpur Continuous Path, two-person show, Lala Gallery, Lafayette
2010: Impressions Multiplied, Foreman Gallery, Anderson Center for the Arts, Oneonta
2009: Reclaiming the Circle: Creative Exploration in Grey, Lala Gallery, Lafayette
Ina Kaur: Recent Works (two person exhibition), Gallery 211, Downtown, Laramie
2008: Converging Divergence, Arkansas State University, Jonesboro Semeiotikos of Our Time, Palette Art Gallery, Jodhpur
2007: Reclaiming the Circle, Patti and Rusty Rueff West Galleries, West Lafayette
2002: Prarambh, Three Person Show, Rabindra Bhawan, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi
Participations
2019:
CIMA Awards Show, CIMA Gallery, Gem Cinema, Studio 21, Kolkata
Summer Show, CIMA Gallery, Kolkata
Tall Tales – a story of a person and Reading Nature, creative visual/verbal story telling workshop, collaborative performance with Vikram Sridhar, Kitaabo – The Blue City Children’s Literature Festival, Jodhpur (co-organizer: Self)
Edition Zero, Curated Print Project, collaboration between InkSpace Studio and ‘Prati – the Atelier’, Bangalore (Organizer: Self)
Facilitated project ‘Shift’ and ‘Anarchy’ (Students, Srishti Institute of Art Design & Technology), Chennai Photo Biennale, Chitadaripath Station, Chennai
2019:
Project, Expansive and Interpretative expression, ‘Evocative Objects – Things We Think
With’ Post Graduate students of Contemporary Art Practice, N6, Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Bengaluru
Srishti Open House, “Chhaap,” group exhibition, CAP MFA Program, N6 Campus, Srishti Institute of Art Design & Technology, Bangalore
Workshop project, “Mythical Creatures _Visual stories from out of this world, Bangalore
Literature Festival (BLF), Bangalore
Paper and Ink, Hudson Gallery, Sylvania
2018:
Rewriting the Master Narrative, a national juried, Arts + Literature Lab, Madison
1 Print Biennale India, Lalit Kala Akademi, National Academy of Art, New Delhi
To J. Alfred Prufrock, Home Sweet Home, Bangalore
Pluralism: Contemporary Prints from India, 965 Project Gallery, Center for Visual Art, Metropolitan State University, Denver
Creativity – transforming society, Collaborative Community Art Project, Berufskolleg Ehrenfeld (BKE), Cologne, Germany (Organizer: Self)
Public Art Project, “Tarapura Tarapura”, a collaboration between Srishti PG Art students, government school children, villagers; Nandi foothills, Sultanpet Kalyani (step well), Bangalore (co-organizer: Self)
Indian Inked, Society of Northern Alberta Print (SNAP), Edmonton
For Prufrock, with love, Benevolent Love, Home Sweet Home, Bangalore
Exhibition of Contemporary Indian Printmakers, Center for Visual Arts, Denver
Fragment Encounter, ‘Deceptive Expectation’, collaborative Artist installation Project; IMPACT Conference, Santander, Spain
Re-Riding History, Trout Gallery, Carlisle Work Contributed for a Publication Book Project, “The Dot that went for a walk…,”
Shrishti Art Gallery, Hyderabad (Project to promote social initiatives for the welfare of girl child and to publish the Book on role Models)
Invited Artist Workshop, “Beyond Rendition,” Kitaabo – The Blue City Children‘s
Literature Festival, Jodhpur
Artist Residency, Sowing Seed, Kallron Ki Dhani, Jaisalmer
2017:
Material Memory, Curatorial Project, CEMA Gallery, Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore
Triennale Mondiale de l’Estampe de Chamalières, A.M.A.C Association Mouvement
d’Art Contemporain, Galerie municipale d’art contemporain, Chamalières, France
FineXT: an Exhibition of Small Contemporary Artworks, Canarys National Art
Foundation, Cabarys Gallery, Indore
Collaborative Print Production Project, Art Park “Meet Printmakers”, Town Hall,
Ravindra Kalashetra, Sculpture Park, Bengaluru
Khel – Games people play, International prints by Chhaap Foundation, Museum Gallery, Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur
2017:
Et Tu, Art Brute?, Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York
Indian inked, Union Gallery, The University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Milwaukee
Artist in Residency, Rosehips Center Marpha Foundation, Mustang District, Nepal
2017 – 20:
Bheti, Curated Bangalore Studio Visits, bimonthly event, Bangalore
2016:
FIVE by FIVE! Tampa, Tampa Museum of Art, Florida
Edinboro National Printmaking Competition, Bruce Gallery, Egress Press and Research, Edinboro
Sixty Square Inches, Stewart Center Gallery, Purdue University, West Lafayette
Invisible Cities, Constellation Studios, Collaborative book Project, Lincoln
The Game of Life: Inspiration and the Artist Book, Laramie Library, Cheyenne
Imagined Place Map, International Invitational, The University of Colorado, Boulder;
Travelling to: New Mexico
GANJIFA: PLAYING CARDS, Univ. of Nebraska
Omaha, Weber Art Building, Omaha
World building, Exhibited in conjunction with SGCI, San Francisco
Travelled to: Bowling Green University, Bowling Green, OH, Chicago Institute of Art, Chicago
Exquisite Porch, Morean Art Center, St. Petersburg
Public Art Workshop, Shaping our landscapes, “Talking Sites”, co-conducted by Annemarie
Bucher, Srishti, Institute for Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore
Career Mentoring, ”Flux: The Edge of Yesterday and Tomorrow”, Southern Graphics, Council
International Conference, Portland
Acheivements:
2018: Indo-European Residency Award, Interdisciplinary Project, Kolkata
2018: Emerging Voice Award, Purdue College of Liberal Arts, West Lafayette
2016: Juror Award and Purchase Award, Sixty Square Inches exhibition, Stewart Gallery, Lafayette