A studio presentation by Space Studio Grant 2024 awardee, Santanu Dey, talk by artist Surabhi Saraf and 12 artists in the residence displayed their works in the studio.

Sathi Guin’s solo preview at Space Studio

We had an overwhelming response to our Winter residency open studio over the weekend. Thank you for joining us !

Space Studio participates in the first edition of Art Mumbai! Please do visit Booth 29 from the 16-19th of November 2023 at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse, Mumbai.

SPACE STUDIO ALUMNI SHOW 2023

Space Studio is delighted to present its first Residency Alumni exhibition. Since its inception in 2005, Space Studio has focused on supporting artists’ studio practices. In 2019, Space Studio relocated to its current venue at Alembic City in Vadodara, where the focus is still on studio practices in the form of three residency cycles annually. These artists’ residencies form an integral part of Space Studio’s program. As we move from one residency to the next our alumnus continues to expand. Now into the fifth year of Space Studio at Alembic City, we have invited artists from each residency to be a part of the Space Studio Alumni Show 2023. The purpose of this exhibition is to showcase the talent and works of artists who have been a part of Space Studio’s journey and to share their works with a larger network of collectors, galleries, institutions, and patrons. Ranging from painting and drawing to sculpture, textile, print, and installation, Space Studio’s artists have explored and expanded the range of mediums they engage with through their practice.

FEATURING ARTISTS

Shaikh Azgharali
Sheena Bajaria
Saubiya Chasmawala
Hardev Chauhan
Rashesh Chauhan
Debasree Das
Julius Das
Yash Desai
Priyanka D’Souza
Teja Gavankar
Satyanarayan Gavara
Anila Govindappa
Krishna Ghosh
Nidhi Khurana
Akshata Mokashi
Madhukar Mucharla
Raka Panda
Neeraj Patel
Deena Pindoria
Keerti Pooja
Ahalya Rajendran
Savitha Ravi
Deepika Sakhat
Gurjeet Singh
Yashwini Singh
Urna Sinha
Sonali Sonam
Harman Taneja
Sashikanth Thavudoz
Mahavir Wadhwana

We had an overwhelming response to our Summer residency open studio over the weekend. Thank you for joining us !

10 selected applicants will spend the month learning to write artist statements, applications, bios, and portfolios, as well as to communicate their practice to galleries, museums, curators, and other practitioners.

We had an overwhelming response to our Winter residency open studio over the weekend. Thank you for joining us !

Space Studio presents:

CITY and CITIES – By Gulammohammed Sheikh

An artist, storyteller, poet and writer, Gulammohammed Sheikh is a pioneering figure for Indian contemporary art with an artistic practice spanning over six decades. His works are layered with images, narratives and mediums to bring forth his experience, travels, memories and curiosity in creating links between history, politics and the present. Through paradoxical situations in his work, Sheikh continues to push the boundaries of medium in painting, sculpture, writing, photography and digital media in a collage like manner. In the foreword to a book on the artist, At Home in the World, Chaitanya Sambrani describes the artist’s works such: “Just as works of poetry need a sharper concentration, the paintings of Gulam, much like the poet he is, seek to reveal themselves only to the patient viewer. His paintings are not ones to be looked at for a few minutes to try and extract the meaning, as if they were a puzzle. Gulam's works nearly always need us, the viewers, to have a contextual lesson on his thought process, on his ideas, on his journey towards his work.”

 In 1981, Sheikh declared his life-manifesto: “Living in India means living in several cultures and times.” The exhibition presented here at Space Studio is a comprehensive display of the artist’s preoccupation and exploration with the City of Baroda, alongside other Cities that have entered his work over the years. Rooted in socio-economic contexts, City and Cities contour the effects of ethnicities, religions and people. In 1955, at the age of eighteen, Sheikh shifted to Baroda from Surendranagar. In Baroda, he first studied and later taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the M S University. Baroda was also a doorway to the world for the artist. From here, Sheikh travelled extensively to study and explore London, Europe, USA and other countries. Every new city added layers of memory maps to the artist’s mind. He explored situations and characters – both mythic and real – that became subjects in his works. Sheikh was drawn to literature and read history extensively. He participated in literary circles to discuss poetry, criticism and storytelling while also writing essays and poetry alongside. He played with language and explored various styles of poetry influenced by Labhshakar Rawal in Surendranagar, Zaverchand Meghani, Nirmal Verma, Shrikant Verma, Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena, Sunil Kothari and Pradumna Tana. Sheikh experimented with the Kathiawadi dialect and moved into free form and vernacular writing. Eleven poems on cities, including Jaisalmer (1963), an outcome of Sheikh’s travels in Rajasthan, are on display here with English translations. These poems were also composed into songs by Vanraj Bhatia, the recording of which can be heard alongside a presentation of Sheikh’s photographs of Jaisalmer. The artist looked at writing and painting as mediums that complimented and layered each other.

Sheikh’s observations and memories of the cities influence the storyline with which these works could be read. His interest in mapping and picturing the world that are evident in the series Mappamundi (early 2000s – ongoing), can be seen influencing the studies of the City through sketches and cross sections of aerial maps. In 2006 and 2010 Sheikh travelled China extensively. His research resulted in a seminal work that included painting, sculpture and installation, titled CITY: Memory, Dreams, Desire, Statues and Ghosts: Return of Hiuen Tsang displayed in Shanghai in 2010 – 11. The original drawing for the work is on display here along with reprints of the large painting panels and replicated editions of the sculptures. The exhibition here also showcases the artist’s working process that involved satellite imagery of Baroda taken from Google Earth. Describing this work in his essay At Home in the World, Sambrani writes: “The city was populated with the minutiae of everyday life, much in the manner of other essays into the world-picture that Sheikh has made over the decades, but punctuated by haunting memories of violence, most recently that of 2002. The sloping, ellipsoidal section along the ground was built up in papier-maché relief to represent major institutional buildings including Baroda's administrative, legal, penal, educational and regal apparatus. Papier-maché statuettes stood at various junctions in the relief even as images of statues commemorating rulers and heroes dotted the painted city. Sheikh's stated intention was to create 'other spaces of memory, dreams and desire', to imagine what a seeker after truth travelling the Silk Road such as Hiuen Tsang (Xuanzang) might find if he were to walk to contemporary Baroda after concluding his business at Nalanda.”

Alongside the City and Jaisalmer poems, the exhibition also presents a series of Sheikh’s original prints and reprints of paintings that explore the artist’s curiosity with the city and its people. It is pertinent to note the visual angle of observation or the bird’s eye view that allows for the viewer to enter the work as an observer. This is how the artist has collected memories and visuals over the years and layered them through different mediums using storytelling, mystery and growing layers of memory to his work. His ongoing preoccupation between the city and the world are arterial to this exhibition as they are to his practice, and in a way also to how each of us navigate our everyday encounters with layers of memory creating meaning in what we take away objectively or subjectively, with time and with people with who we encounter our histories.

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Born in Surendranagar, Saurashtra, Gujarat in 1937, Gulammohammed Sheikh completed an MFA in painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Baroda, Vadodara. He received the Commonwealth Scholarship at the Royal College of Art, London in 1966 and was later conferred an associate of the academy. At MSU, Baroda, he taught art history and painting and also served as a visiting artist faculty at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002 and a visiting fellow at Delhi University in 2004. An avid writer, Shiekh was also a writer/ artist in residence at the South Asia Regional Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania in 2000 and has participated in several other residencies internationally. Among many accolades, Sheikh was awarded the National Award by the Lalit Kala Akademi in 192, the Padma Shri in 1983 and the Padma Bhushan in 2014. His works have been exhibited widely across institutions, galleries, museums, biennales and triennials, and are held in important public and private collections around the world.

Curatorial and Installation Team: Ramchandra Gandhi, Kavya Oza, Chirag Panchal, Veeranganakumari Solanki, Studio Gulammohammed Sheikh, Alembic carpenter and lighting team

Click here to watch the talk by Gulammohammed Sheikh on the occasion of the opening of his solo exhibition 'City and Cities' at Space Studio, Baroda

At Space Studio we are delighted to present an institutional exhibition of nearly fifty works by Nasreen Mohamedi. Realized in partnership with the Glenbarra Art Museum, the show opened on 8 December with an inaugural speech by the founder of the museum, Mr. Maasanori Fukuoka, followed by an extremely moving and personal talk by Gulam Mohammed Sheikh about his friendship with Nasreen, her life and how various aspects of her everyday seeped into her practice and work as an artist.

The exhibition continues until 15 January 2023. 

Click here to watch the talk by Gulam Mohammed Sheikh.

We had an overwhelming response to our Monsoon residency open studio over the weekend. Thank you for joining us !

Space Studio was pleased to host an engaging and interactive exhibition of Wendy Weiss and Lauren Bechelli's paintings and textiles installed with Jay Kreimer's invented musical instruments and a sound performance by him. The Distillery was transformed with these various mediums that interacted with the architecture of the space. Jay Kreimer also conducted a successful workshop on making invented musical instruments.

Thank you for an overwhelming response on the opening evening of our Summer Residency’s Open Studio weekend. The thirteen artists have spent the past four months exploring and experimenting with scale and medium. We begun our weekend’s events with previous resident, Praveen Maripelly’s from screening, followed by a presentation by Veerangana Solanki on her recent visit to Documenta and the Venice Biennale.

Shrine Empire & Space Studio present

inversion, incision, immateriality

by Ayesha Singh and Abhimanyu Dalal

at India Art Fair 2022, Booth #F4Artist Ayesha Singh and architect Abhimanyu Dalal’s collaborative work creates a syntagmatic sequence of languages in an installation of kinetic lights. They have identified over a hundred languages spoken in India, which are contained in the installation of an inverted pyramid in the form of their written scripts. These include scripts that are no longer used, those that have been forgotten, and others that are widely recognized. The work generates a room of multilingual words, layering alphabet on alphabet from one or more planes of the pyramid onto the architecture that hosts the work, and formulates the potential of the formation of intentional and coincidental combinations. Arabic, Brahmi, Devanagari, Bodo, Khasi, English and many other scripts refract and generate new encounters of the spoken and the written.

Swirling sometimes gibberish, sometimes sensibilities, meanings and codes about the world around us. It begins to question, how does one work with the spoken when it has no written?

The Golden Road’, an exhibition of photographs by William Dalrymple

Space Studio in collaboration with Vadehra Art Gallery presents photographs from three series of works: In Search of Ancient India, The Historian’s Eye, and Dalrymple’s recent travels across South East Asia. The black and white photographs of architectural heritage sites and landscapes depict narratives of the author and photographer’s ongoing research

10 selected applicants spent the month learning to write artist statements, applications, bios, portfolios, as well as to communicate their practice to galleries, museums, curators, and other practitioners.

The seven residents of Space Studio's Craft Residency have spent the past three months exploring and expanding their practices and research through new materials, ideas and inspirations from the city of Baroda and the sites around their studios.

Space Studio congratulates Zishaan A Latif as the recipient of the Space Studio Artist's Grant 2022

An independent photographer since 2005, Zishaan A Latif’s work stems from intuition and passion which blends into the personal and sometimes eclectic. Working across many genres in the field, Zishaan refers to the art of making a photograph as something thrilling and thus a release from preconceived notions of visual imagery or expectations from the various schools of thought. Zishaan works with different textures, formats and art forms, even using the art of motion pictures in his creative pursuits. His work has been featured in both commercial and non-commercial collections, exhibitions and publications worldwide. Zishaan’s photographs have also been awarded and nominated for several awards, and most recently, he was the recipient of the 3rd Prize in Contemporary Issues 2021 for the World Press Photo Award.

Space Studio in collaboration with The Ceramic Centre hosted a ceramic exhibition ‘Chalo Kaam Kariye… Remembering Jyotsna Bhatt’. The sixteen artist exhibition that has evolved over a two week period of workshops at The Ceramic Centre is a tribute to Jyotsna Bhatt while celebrating her in spirit through clay, colour and form.

Space Studio's Open Studio exhibition opened on 12th November. The opening was the first physical art event since March 2020, and most of the programming of residencies and support took place online. The ongoing exhibition has the works of the previous residents who did not have the opportunity to exhibit their works physically, as well as the ongoing Monsoon Residents. With over 20 artists participating in the Open Studio, the exhibition spaces that have works on display include all the seven studios, the outdoor areas as well as The Distillery.

Space Studio collaborates with Mimesis Print Studio to showcase ‘Envelope I’; an exhibition of 30 Artists. The envelope was imagined to be a set of etchings by a group of artists as the first set of prints to be produced at the Memesis Studio. The exhibitions brought together some of the most senior printmakers as well as gave an opportunity to young printmakers across the country. This portfolio consists of 62 editions of 30 prints.

SPACE STUDIO is pleased to announce the Artist's Grant 2021 Awardee

Congratulations Amshu Chukki!

The final selection by our jury was a close call with several strong applications. Amshu Chukki's application stood out for the diverse way in which he proposes to push mediums and ask questions through his research and practice.

Amshu Chukki is an artist based out of Bengaluru. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S.University of Baroda in 2014. He was listed in the ‘Forbes India 30 under 30’ in 2016 and is arecipient of the Inlaks Fine Arts Award in 2014. His debut exhibition, The Tour, was held at Chatterjee& Lal in 2017. Some of the group exhibitions, he was part of are, Chennai photo Biennale 2018; ‘TURN OF THE TIDE’ 20/20Artists for KHOJ, - KHOJ New Delhi, 2018, Asia Film Focus 2017: Time Machine, Objectifs Centre forPhotography and Film, Singapore, ‘India: Maximum City’, curated by Birgid Uccia, St.Moritz ArtMasters, Switzerland 2014. Some of the Residencies and workshops he was part of are, AtelierStiftung Kunstdepot, Göshenen, Switzerland, 2018, The Darling Foundry, India – Québec Residency,2015, ‘Coriolis Effect: Currents across India and Africa’, KHOJ New Delhi, 2015.

Join us for the Summer Residency Open Studio on 26-28th of December 2020 at Space Studio. By appointments only.

Please message your time and name to book your one hour slot on +91 7878048370 or +91 9228585741

Despite the uncertain time faced by all of us, the Studio managed to open to its residents post the lockdown. We were able to host a couple of online sessions for the artists including ‘Creativity as practice’ by Veerangaana Solanki and Shaleen Wadhwana and ‘An Introduction to the Asia Art Archive’ by Samira Bose and Noopur Desai. With correct measures in place we were able to host Sachin Karne under our mentorship programme for the residents.