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INDIA NOW festival launches in London, UK
until Sept 2007
India Now, the most comprehensive festival of culture from the subcontinent ever to be staged in the capital. This summer, London gives you the chance to celebrate the riches of India's diverse and dazzling traditions.  Browse the listings, read the features, check back soon for new highlights, and experience India Now all summer long.
http://www.visitlondon.com/london/india/

Gandhi’s London : A Walk

Gandhi’s London walk is a 2 to 3 Hour journey through heart of London. It takes visitors back 
into M.K. Gandhi’s days in London as a student, civil rights activist and then leader of Indian 
freedom struggle. Visitors will see and feel the inner London that Gandhi saw, places he lived, 
studied, explored and walked.

Gandhi’s London Walk 2007 is a tour tracing his footsteps over a hundred years ago through central 
London and looking at historical buildings associated with him, South Africa and India.
Gandhi visited London on five occasions. He spent the longest time in London as a student, lived 
at various locations across the length and breadth of the city, made lifelong friendships, travelled to 
suburbs and got to interact with many luminaries of the time.

His three visits as a civil rights leader in South Africa were brief but critical to his interaction with 
civil rights leaders, as well as colonial authorities. He made many public speeches and attended 
meetings across London. He started to acquire a strong following over the years in London and by 
the time he made his final visit was to attend the round table conference, he was already a huge celebrity. 
Groups and individuals jostled to see him and be in his company. Gandhi chose to be with the poorest 
of the poor.

Gandhis London walk usually organized on Saturdays. Please see the schedules at http://gandhislondon.com/walk-dates/
http://gandhislondon.com/

Shakespearience
Stratford Upon Avon, England
August 28th- September 4th
http://www.shakespearience.co.uk/

Millfield Theatre
London, England
September 5th and 6th
http://www.millfieldtheatre.co.uk/show.php?show_id=286

"To Be Or Not To Be"... the story behind Hamlet (solo)

In the mid 1990s Raoul Bhaneja saw two productions that would later inspire him to create Hamlet (solo) with director Robert Ross Parker.

ELSINORE created and performed by Robert Lepage was a theatrical and design tour de force that had a very visual focus in it's exploration of Shakespeare's Hamlet.  Around the same time Clare Coulter performed THE FEVER by Wallace Shawn, which she did without the aid of any theatrical tools.  Performed in living rooms, rehearsal halls and other non traditional spaces it used no costume changes, lighting or sound cues.  Her stunning intimacy was achieved by using the most basic of elements in the theatre:  The Audience, The Actor and The Word.  

Hamlet (solo) began to take shape in 2000 while Robert and Raoul were members of the Soulpepper Young Company.  After some initial meetings and work with former class mate and National Theatre School Alum Chris Abraham, Robert and Raoul began developing a vocabulary and a plan for the future production.  

In 2002 Raoul was awarded the Christopher Plummer Fellowship,  to study at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, England.  There he worked with Mark Rylance, himself a former a Hamlet and tested out many of the theories they had been working on in rehearsal.  Through that informative time he discovered that many of the aspects of their developing production were supported by the "architecture" of The Globe.  The biggest realization was that with Shakespeares plays performed in natural light, the actors on stage could clearly see the faces of audience members.  Unlike the "black boxes" of the modern theatre, "The O" lent itself to a more interactive and intimate experience where the audience was an essential aspect of the storytelling and experience.  

Hope and Hell Theatre Company was formed in 1995 by Raoul Bhaneja and Birgitte Solem.  it is based in Toronto Canada and is currently developing THE BLUES PROJECT with The Banff Centre.   For more information on Hamlet (solo) and Hope and Hell Theatre and details on tickets and times go to http://www.raoulbhaneja.com/hamletsolo/index.htm

upto  10th September 2007

installation exhibition in London, uk: Building Sight: Curatorial Project

'What is Delhi?' I ask myself.
I reply, 'The world is a body, and Delhi, the soul'.
•  Mirza Ghalib

Cities are building sites. Construction never ends; work is in progress. "Building Sight" - brick by retinal brick, pixel by pixel, frame by frame - is a consideration of what it means to start a conversation, standing where we are located, in Delhi, with the body of the world, and its soul. The city can strike you as a maelstrom. The city swells, becomes strange, crowded, dense. Evictions breed evictions. A city becomes something you hang on to as you lurch into daily uncertainties. Yet, time is sought for pauses, for breath, for play, for dreaming, for the carving out of spaces, handholds and corridors which make the city livable.

"Building Sight" is a sketch of how a way of thinking about a city can be constructed. It is also a provisional index of conversations that we have been having for some time with friends, colleagues and correspondents - architects & urbanists, filmmakers   & cinematographers, researchers, practitioners, editors and designers - who have helped us to think about what it means to live in cities. Many of them are from Delhi, some from Mumbai and Bangalore. To us, their work anticipates, rather than represents, what the response of contemporary art practice to the South Asian city can be.

With Sanjay Kak, Ruchir Joshi, Satyajit Pande, Solomon Benjamin, Ravikant Sharma, Prabhat Kumar Jha, Nancy Adajania, CyberMohalla Ensemble, Sarai Media Lab and the Sarai.txt Broadsheet Collective

Variable size installation with 9 video projections, sound, photo prints and slide projections
http://www.watermans.org.uk/exhibitions/building_sight_curatorial_project/

Watermans 40 High Street Brentford TW8 0DS
http://www.watermans.org.uk/contact/

until Sept. 23 2007
 in zurich, switzerland: "Courtly paintings From India: Masterpieces From the Museum Rietberg Collection”

Indian artists produced magnificent paintings on paper for the Mughal emperors and the Hindu princes of Rajasthan and the mountainous region of the western Himalayas. These pictures illustrate not only religious and poetic subjects, but also depict aristocratic social gatherings, hunts, music recitals and courtly splendour. 65 paintings from the museum collection outline important art historical developments in Indian painting from 1150 to 1850. Drawn from its own collection, the pictures illustrate religious subjects, depict social gatherings and the activities they generated such as hunting and music recitals. At the time of their creation, these pictures were meant to be displayed privately on a table top, or looked at on one's lap. 

Museum Rietberg Zürich Park-Villa Rieter  Gablerstrasse 15  8002 Zurich  Switzerland  Tel. + 41 (0)44 206 31 31  www.rietberg.ch

*new* exhibition in arles, France
The Rencontres d'Arles 2007
http://www.rencontres-arles.com/index.php/home/en

PRINCELY TRADITIONS / MODERN VISIONS: Souvenir Albums and the Embellished Image

The Alkazi Collection of Photography is pleased to present INDIA:  PRINCELY TRADITIONS / MODERN VISIONS:  Souvenir Albums and the Embellished Image.  This two-part exhibition will be at the Rencontres D’Arles, Photographie, Espace Van Gogh throughout the festival.

Both exhibitions illustrate how photography developed in India, shaping a deeply imaginative form of visual representation that penetrated almost every aspect of the religious, cultural, and courtly life.

The fifteen “Souvenir Albums” on display show the official and ceremonial lives of royal families in India.  Divided into four areas of interest--the princely State of Rewa, Imperial Albums, Personal Albums, and Wedding Albums--the choice and sequence of images reveal the private records and religious roles of several princely families.

The “Embellished Image” includes 68 painted and tinted photographs dating from the 1840s to the 1940s.  This selection presents a hybrid style that marked the evolution of photography within India.  Images of rulers, priests, and later the general public, are primarily decorated in powerful hues with gouache and oil.  The ateliers of artists and studio photographers in India, some of whom remain unidentified, demonstrate a unique merger of painting and photography.

The Alkazi Collection of Photography is an archive of 19th and early 20th century photographic prints from South and South East Asia.  Consisting of over 85,000 prints, the collection is located in Delhi, London, and New York to facilitate research.  The photographic holdings of the Alkazi Collection document the progress of socio-political life in the subcontinent, Burma, and Ceylon through the inter-disciplinary fields of architecture, anthropology, topography, and archaeology, from the 1840s and up to the rise of modern India and the Independence Movement of 1947.

INDIA
Indian encounters, curated by Alain Willaume in collaberation  with  Devika Daulet-Singh, a key figure in the Indian photogrphy revival and the inspired women director of the  Photo Ink. agency. Dayanita Singh, Bharat Sikka, Anay Mann, Jeetin Sharma are between 30 and 40 years old and represent the new wave of the sub-continent. They are helped by Raghu Rai, le correspondent from the Magnum agency (honored in another exhibition) and by a much older personality, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil (1870-1954), who photographed all of his family and in particular his daughter prodigy, painter Amrita, who died prematurely in 1941.
Rencontres photographiques d’Arles (Photographic encounters of Arles), exhibitions to 16 September.
http://www.rencontres-arles.com/index.php/groupe/en/4

Les Rencontres D’Arles Photographie 2007
 Arles, France
http://www.rencontres-arles.com/index.php/home/en

September 26  8:00 pm 

Zarina Bhimji on the Turner Prize shortlist

The Turner Prize is a contemporary art award that always provokes debate and is widely 
recognised as one of the most important and prestigious awards for the visual arts in Europe.
The four artists who have been shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2007 are Zarina Bhimji, Nathan Coley, Mike Nelson and Mark Wallinger.
For the first time the prize is to be held outside of London, at Tate Liverpool, as a curtain-raiser
 for Liverpool European Capital of Culture 2008. The Turner Prize exhibition will feature the work 
of four short listed British artists and will open at Tate Liverpool on 19 October 2007.

Zarina Bhimji is best-known for her beautiful but haunting films and photographs, described by
 the judges as 'deeply romantic imagery with a strong sense of portent, of disquiet, of melancholy'. 
Born in 1963 in Mbarara, Uganda, Zarina Bhimji now lives and works in London and Berlin. 
For her solo exhibitions at Haunch of Venison, London and Zurich, with work engaging with universal human emotions such as grief, pleasure, love and betrayal using non-narrative photography 
and film-making. Through powerful, atmospheric and poignant imagery, Bhimji's recent work demonstrates a new approach to her long-standing preoccupations and research. In her work Zarina Bhimji explores the politics and poetics of power and history through images rich in colour, 
texture and content.
http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/turnerprize2007/default.shtm