The Artist Society Podcast

Learning to stay sane with artist Avnit Singh

Avnit Singh speaks to Tasneem Lohani about how art becomes refuge in trying times, in nurturing interior worlds and evoking acts of making kin. She reveals how art as a calling discovered her relatively late, as a result of navigating life with an altruistic curiosity and an urge to create for its own sake. Framed within matrices of chance and spontaneity, her practice has become a vehicle to excavate memories and enable gathering to communally reconcile with time, inviting novel and unmediated ways of sensing ones’ circumstances. The two artists talk of the limits of democracy within capitalism, of receiving kindness from women at critical moments, and of making art and finding joy as a resistance to a future that feels bleak. - Jones Benny John writer, researcher

Politics of Emotional Life on Social Media | Curator Nupur Doshi in Conversation with Artist Tasneem Lohani

Curator Nupur Doshi and Artist Tasneem Lohani discuss themes from Lohani's solo exhibition, 'It's taking longer to download that it was to puke up' currently on view at Fulcrum, Bombay. Engaging with platform politics, social media and the impact of platform design on how humans communicate in digital spaces as these new etiquettes and behaviours translate to the IRL. Oorja Garg writes about Lohani's work in the show, "In an era of pervasive digitality, networked software has become embedded in the infrastructure of everyday life. Accessed through black mirrors of varying sizes, it now permeates the basis of human interaction, generating a paradoxical condition in which the presence of others can be continuously felt while one remains alone.  Underlying these interactions is a networked logic composed of links and nodes, structured through vectoral mapping and visualization of a shared connectivity. Flickering lights on these glass surfaces, along with icons, buttons, notifications, and many more user interface elements, are built to map behavioral patterns and engineer sustained engagement. Lohani’s work dissects this imagery and its underlying infrastructure that has influenced our perception and how we relate to the world. In the times when one can befriend an agreeable AI, Lohani does not attempt to resolve contradictions. Instead, she invites a return to memories of early encounters with the internet, to the desire for connection that shaped them and asks to re-consider our relationship with these systems now." This episode is a recording of an artist talk that took place at Fulcrum, Bombay during the opening weekend of Lohani's show. Special thanks to Fulcrum, Bombay for hosting this conversation.

Make yourself at home | a conversation with Imaad Majeed

In this episode, Tasneem talks to Imaad Majeed, a poet, sometimes DJ and often artist, from Sri Lanka (/Ilankai). They talk about their multidisciplinary arts practice rooted in themes of belonging to Land, about their project, KACHA KACHA, a trilingual performance collective that invites artists, musicians, singers, rappers and poets to perform at working class bars to perform original material in Sinhalese, Tamil and English.  Imaad sometimes performs his own poetry which is inspired from his past life as a journalist, his relationship with his motherland and his interest in language. As artists hailing from Sri Lanka and India respectively, Imaad and Tasneem also talk about the politics of Diaspora that Asian artists have to contend with when showing work internationally, compare art scenes between India, Sri Lanka and the West and discuss gatekeeping in the art world, touching upon class divides and how colonialism has impacted our psyches.

We are not done yet! hope in the time of crisis with artist Salik Ansari

In episode 3, Salik and Tasneem, friends for over seven years, talk about many topics while examining each new train of thought through the lens of his art practice. They discuss the effects of social media on society - a general lack of empathy, a sense of fear and hopelessness, and being digitally manipulated by algorithms and the politics around image-making at large. While also strategising ways to tackle its problems with creativity and wit. They touch upon how, in an artist's personal life, their family members and strangers interpret or misinterpret their art and practices as they try to articulate what the essence of being an artist is to them. Artist Image: Anoushka Bhatnagar

Living in a woman's body with artist Vasudhaa Narayanan

Episode 2 of the podcast is a conversation with Artist Vasudhaa Narayanan. We speak to her about her exploration of the politics of women's bodies and gender under caste in an Indian society. Looking at women's relationships with their bodies beyond shame and hate, and into a space of acceptance. This podcast episode was a special one for us as we got to speak with Vasudhaa in the gallery space, which held her new series of photographs - the show ‘spoiled fruit’ in the newly opened Fulcrum gallery in Bombay. Conversing intimately near her work, there was no escaping the intent of her imagery. The photographs, sound and the artist book that comprised the show spoke to us deeply, on the subject of the shame we hold, both internal and external, about our bodies; hoping for an eventual acceptance of who we are. The conversation took a similar flow, opening old wounds and revealing shared fears that we as women carry in our bodies, and how Vasudhaa has tried to reclaim the trust she shared with her body in her childhood through the making of this body of work. --- Artist Portrait Credits - Nishant Saldanha