Which Art Show Will You Visit?

"What will I do with all this land? (Picnic)", (2005) by Nikhil Chopra. Photo courtesy of Chatterjee & Lal.

After a dry monsoon run, the art season finally kicks off, with multiple shows scheduled to open this Thursday, August 9. Which one to see? A guide to helping you pick:

Sakshi Gallery
Tanna House, 11-A Nathalal Parekh Marg, Colaba. Tel: 022 6610 3424.
These six French short films, shown in collaboration with Alliance Française, boil down much of our existentialist dramas—namely those concerned with love and loneliness—as only the French can. In Gratte-papier, two strangers make a connection on the Paris Metro; in Jeanne à petits pas, a middle-aged woman finds she has no place to go; while in Le bon numéro, a lonely woman tries to find her soulmate in a public garden and receives a text message that just might make her dreams come true.
When: Thursday, August 9, from 6.30pm.

Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke
2 Sunny House, 16/18 Mereweather Road, behind the Taj Mahal Hotel, Colaba. Tel: 022 2202 3030.
Siji Krishnan works with and on rice paper, dappling her delicate canvas with circles and lines to create feather-thin impressions of seeds and flowers. Most striking is her “Ophelia”, awash in a river of seeds, and the work “Seeds” itself, a cloud of them wrought with tiny faces of expressive wonder.
Until: Saturday, September 29.

Gallery Maskara
Warehouse on Third Pasta, 6/7 Third Pasta Lane, Colaba. Tel: 022 2202 3056.
The last time Avantika Bawa showed at Gallery Maskara, she turned the gallery into a castle of crates. This time around, construction material is also at the forefront of her exhibit, a tower of bright orange scaffolding that speaks to the urban patterns that clutter our skylines. Juxtaposed with this installation is a series of photographs taken at construction sites in Delhi and Mumbai that have been “photo bombed” with Bawa’s elegant architectural blueprints.
Until: Thursday, September 13.

Chatterjee & Lal
01/18 Kamal Mansion, above Ambience Art Emporium, Arthur Bunder Road, Colaba. Tel: 022 6521 5105.
To celebrate the fifth anniversary of their gallery, owners Mortimer Chatterjee and Tara Lal have brought out the big guns, in a sort of “best of” look back. From Sophie Ernst’s audio installation of Pakistani men talking about their notion of the afterlife (incidentally part of the first show to take place at the gallery in 2007) to Nikhil Chopra’s black-and-white portraits taken in full regal kit and shot in the hills of Kashmir, you have every reason to visit. A few more reasons: works by Aditya Pande, Hetain Patel, Minam Apang, Nasreen Mohamedi, Rashid Rana and Sahej Rahal.
Until: Saturday, September 22.

Clark House
Ground Floor, 8 Nathalal Parekh Marg, opposite Sahakhari Bandar, near Woodside Inn, Colaba. Tel: 98202 13816.
Prabhakar Pachpute, an M. S. University graduate in sculpture, grew up in Chandrapur, a coal-rich district in Maharashtra. In “Canary In A Coal Mine”, his wall mural in a poky room in Clark House, Pachpute takes us underground mimicking the treacherous feeling of being trapped in a mine. Viewers are provided with torchlights and as you scan the ceiling and walls, you realise Pachpute has wrought with infinite care the over-inflated corporate honchos who deplete the environment at the cost of everything else, and also the townspeople, like his brother and uncle, who live, not always well or safely, from mining “black gold”.
Until: Until Friday, August 31.

Last Ship
50-A Huma Bungalow, near Quantum Park, Chuim Village Road, Khar. Tel: 6534 6906.
Three artists currently in residence at Last Ship—Shubhalakshmi Shukla, Chandni Vora and Vaibhav Raj Shah—will be showing their new works to the public starting tomorrow, Friday, August 10. Of particular note are Raj Shah’s interventions, where he grades objects in and around Bandra, giving “marks” to the garden and main gate of Last Ship.
Until: Monday, August 20.