The National Society in Art and Design magazine has published an article ‘Drawing and Performance An international research project’ which is based on the ‘UK-India Education and Research Initiative’ (UKIERI) which began in 2013, with collaboration between Wimbledon College of Arts, University of the Arts London and the Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad. The article published in the Autumn 2017, Issue 20 of the magazine and is written by Simon Betts.
The UKIERI project began in 2013 and was led by Professor Jane Collins of Wimbledon College of Arts, and Professor Ananthakrishnan Balakrishnan from the Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication.
The article elaborately describes the workshop organized in March 2014 where both teams met in Hyderabad to conduct parallel practical workshops with post-graduate students from the Department of fine art and Department of Theatre Studies at the Sarojini School of Arts and Communication in UoH.
The five-day workshop with the post-graduate fine art students sought to address, scrutinise and discuss the role of the performer/artist and the materiality of the performers’ body in (and during) drawing, and how the body might be perceived differently in a digital and temporal landscape. A range of digital media: video and editing programmes, digital sound recording, lighting, Skype and other communication tools were also used during the workshop to give students a feel of the technologies and how to integrate them with art.
As per the article, several other aspects were also incorporated including drawing as being, in essence, an embodied and temporal practice, the exploration and experimentation with digital technology, video and photography and history and expectation.
The interactive workshop allowed students to confront their own position on tradition and modernity and design and develop artwork around the same. Exceptional works of students including Rahul Kanthariya, Anil Xavier and Kunal Kulra, who were a part of the workshop, are also mentioned in the article.
The author, Simon Betts concluded the article by saying “If anything, the juxtaposition of the traditional and the digital quietly empowered the work to reach other levels of engagement, where tradition, history and the now coalesced into work that saw the audience and location become as much the performer as the technology and the students themselves.”
By Monika Tiwari and Swati Pant
MA Communication