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Krishnakrit Annual Art Culture Festival

The Eighth Edition of Krishnakrit Annual Art Culture Festival opened 7 Jan 2012 at the Kalakriti Art Gallery in Hyderabad, India, with prominent artists taking part.

The Festival is woven around an Art Camp whose participants this year are the Krishnakriti Scholarship fellows. The artworks produced during the Camp will be auctioned, and the proceeds of the sales not deducting any expense for the camp will go in the form of Scholarships to the education of deserving young art students. Furthermore, Krishnakriti awards annual residency programmes in France every year, in collaboration with the French Embassy.

Interpreting Tagore

Two years after he last presented Breaking Boundaries in Mumbai, his experiment in “exploring space and body,” as part of his mentoring of street children, Astad Deboo returns with a brand new work. Created in commemoration of the 150th birth anniversary of poet and Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, titled Interpreting Tagore, Deboo works once again with many of the same street children. But where his earlier work introduced the dancers to basics of focus, balance and the capabilities of the body, this one lifts them to new levels of achievement.

Interpreting Tagore uses world music, movement and alternative theatre forms, like puppets and masks, as well as poetry recitation, to create the quintessential Astad Deboo experience at its multi-faceted best. Today, Astad Deboo’s name is synonymous with Contemporary Indian Dance, a style that he pioneered at a time when innovation in Indian dance was not easily accepted. His stunning signature style is characterised by intense focus, concentration, and technical virtuosity, along with a distinctively Indian aesthetic of evoking rasa. Even his most abstract dance has a lot of feeling in it and reaches his audience with profound emotional engagement. This multifaceted artist’s accomplished solo, group, and collaborative choreography includes his work with the Manipuri thang-ta (martial arts), and pungcholam drum dancers in Rhythm Divine.

His humanistic social vision has inspired his creative choreography over the past twenty years with the deaf—first with The Action Players (Dancing Dolphins) in Kolkata, and then with The Clarke School for the Deaf. His choreography entitled ContraPosition with the Clarke School has travelled across India, Southeast Asia, Europe and Australia.

The Astad Deboo Foundation, formed in 2002, aims to provide creative training to both the able and the disabled, and to facilitate the artistic development of talented deaf dancers.

Prabhakar Kolte

Prabhakar Kolte was born in 1946 and received his diploma from the Sir J J School of Art in 1968. Between 1972 and 1994 he taught at the School of Art. He has had several solo shows and participated in important group exhibitions like Art- Mosaic- celebration of Calcutta's Tercentenary, Calcutta and Mumbai, 1990; Wounds, CIMA Gallery, Calcutta, 1993; Parallel Perceptions, Sakshi, Gallery, Mumbai, 1993 and 94 and Bombay- A Tribute To The City organized by RPG Enterprises, Mumbai, 1995.

Kolte has also exhibited at Six Indian Painters curated by Geeta Kapur at Titograd, former Yugoslavia, Ankara and Istanbul, 1985, Three Artists Hong Kong, 1995 and Galerie Foundation for Indian Artists, Amsterdam, 1996. Kolte's abstract layering with paint echo cityscapes where the signs and textures reveal his modernist consciousness. Bands of color juxtaposed against each other create bold ascensions and recessions. Kolte lives and works in Mumbai.

Tallur L N

Born in 1971, Tallur L N studied Painting at CAVA, Mysore University, and received Masters in Museology from the MS University, Baroda. He received the Commonwealth Scholarship to study another Masters in Contemporary Fine Art Practices from the Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, UK. Tallur is the recipient of Inlaks Fine Art Award, in 1997; National Scholarship from the Government of India, 1996; Bose Pacia Prize for Modern Art, New York, in 1999, besides several other prestigious honours. The artist lives and works in Bangalore.

The Krishnakriti Art Foundation was launched in 2003, dedicated to the memory of the late Sri Krishnachandra B Lahoti, and is organised with the support of the Lahoti Foundation to encourage artists and promote educational activities in the field of visual arts. The Festival is intended to celebrate three abiding refinements of life -- art, culture and education. The year 2012 marks the eighth edition of the Festival.

Venue: Kalakriti Art Gallery, #468, Road No. 10, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad.

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