Over more than two decades, Uttam Ghosh’s practice has been shaped by democratic ideals around peoples’ movements, social justice, and equality. Finding expression in political cartoons, magazine covers, posters, illustrations, stage back-drops, street murals, and photo-journalism, he looks back to the influence of growing up in a remote defence township in Nashik, Maharashtra, designed for the Russians who came to India to assemble aircrafts.
His love for Soviet children’s books, comics, graphic and exhibition design, and architecture began in this township, though the family travelled across other defence townships before he migrated to Mumbai.
Initially studying science and mathematics, he shifted to pursuing applied art in the mid-1980s at the Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Art. Agit-prop art, the Soviet experiments in art, propaganda and history books revealed to him how this period influenced the world. He was fascinated by the formalism of the Cubists alongside the Bauhaus School that integrated the arts with mass production. Alongside, he immersed himself in observing the city through the lens of an activist and recorded socio-political movements that erupted in Mumbai and elsewhere from the 1980s including the historic textile mill strikes, the Sikh pogrom, the Namantar Andolan, Narmada Bachao Andolan, Mandal Commission protests, and the communalism after the Babri Masjid demolition. Over the years, such an engagement with the public sphere and its cataclysmic movements connecting the historical with the contemporary has been his abiding concern, including the recent dissents around identity and citizenship in India.
In this presentation, the artist will discuss his wide body of work which crisscross with his contribution as an illustrator, cartoonist, and photo journalist for media houses. His illustrations from 1993 covered all sections – from the children’s page to health, business, fiction, and news. Each time he tried a new style of drawing, and by 1996, he started making regular political cartoons and a weekly Op-Ed page column called ‘Drawing the Lines’ in which he found his true calling.
Uttam Ghosh is a visual artist whose oeuvre spans aesthetics, politics, and activism infused with critical observation and sharp satire. With a BFA in Applied Art from the Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Art, Mumbai (1985), he has recorded a wide range of movements and conflicts around caste, class, and capital that have shaped the socio-spatial dynamics of the city and elsewhere. Creating on the margins of the art world, the daily grind expanded his artistic actions to editorial illustrations, children’s illustrations, and political cartoons for media houses, apart from assignments as a photo journalist. In 2015, his work has been exhibited in the group show Colours of Dissent: Reiterating Contemporary Ambedkar curated by Shabana Ali and organized by Sudharak Olwe, founder of the Photography Promotion Trust at the Artists’ Centre, Mumbai. This coincided with the celebration of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s 125th birth anniversary. In 2018, a retrospective of his works, The Implacable Aperture of Time was curated by Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar at the Clark House Initiative, Mumbai. The artist lives in Navi Mumbai.
Shubhangi Singh is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans moving image, installations, objects and text. Singh considers ideas of absence and absenting in her works, particularly in relation to history, memory, and the labour of memorialising. She is the co-founder of New City Limits (in Navi Mumbai) and currently lives and works in Helsinki.
September 28th, 2024 | 6.00 pm – 7.30 pm IST on Zoom | Open to all.
