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Co-presented with the Surry Art Gallery and moderated ISF’s Artistic Director Sirish Rao. Presented online on Youtube.
Three distinguished Canadian art curators—Indu Vashist, Toleen Touq, and Deepali Dewan—come together to consider some of the key moments in P.Mansaram’s art career: the successes he achieved and the challenges he faced. The discussion will identify some of the dominant subject matter in Mansaram’s art and consider how his work relates to Canadian art and international art of the past half century. The discussion will conclude with reflections on the lasting impact of P.Manasaram’s art on artists working today and in the future.For the late P.Mansaram, repetition was art practice, repetition was meditation, repetition was spirituality, repetition was falling in love, and as he said, repetition was a way to finding god. Yet, for all this interest in repetition, Mansaram’s work is never repetitive. Figures and symbols appear and reappear in different spaces and configurations. Text and image play off each other. P.Mansaram: The Medium is the Medium is the Medium shows how the artist used recurrence and reproduction through a variety of mediums. Visitors will see drawings, paintings, collage, texts, sculptures, xerox, silkscreen prints, and films spanning more than five decades of the artist’s prolific career.
Mansaram’s art invokes unending feelings of travel: through time, dimension, and territory. Having travelled through India, Western Europe, Greece, and Egypt, Mansaram absorbed art from many cultures. The selection of works in this exhibit highlights both material and spiritual elements from his surroundings. Characters, symbols, and spaces convey the artist’s meditative and transcendent processes in form and content. In this regard, the ways in which Mansaram assembled different media and created a sense of place give a nuanced narrative of the diasporic experience.
Deepali Dewan is the Dan Mishra Senior Curator of South Asian Art & Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. She is also an affiliated Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto and co-editor of the online, peer-reviewed journal Trans Asian Photography. Her research spans issues of colonial, modern, and contemporary visual culture in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, with a focus on photography. She is the author of Raja Deen Dayal: Artist-Photographer in 19th-Century India (2013, co-authored with Deborah Hutton), Embellished Reality: Indian Painted Photographs (2012), and the editor of Bollywood Cinema Showcards: Indian Film Art from the 1950s to the 1980s (2011). All three were accompanied by exhibitions.
Indu Vashist has served as the Executive Director of SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) in Toronto since 2013. She is interested in art that is not precious, words that are precise. She has worked various artistic modalities—from theatre to writing. The primary motivation for all aspects is the quest to be and teach embodiment. In addition to being a cultural worker, Vashist is also a yoga and somatics teacher.
Toleen Touq is a curator, cultural producer, and facilitator working between Toronto (Canada) and Amman (Jordan). In Toronto, she is Artistic Director of SAVAC, a nomadic artist-run organization dedicated to presenting and developing the work of marginalized artists on Turtle Island. In Amman, she is co-founding director of Spring Sessions (2014-ongoing), a yearly residency program that brings together artists, researchers, and cultural practitioners in a collaborative and experiential learning environment. She co-initiated The River Has Two Banks (2012-2017), a multi-disciplinary platform that addresses the historical, political, and spatial relations between Jordan and Palestine. Her writings have been published with Ibraaz, Sternberg Press, A Prior, Manifesta Journal, and others.
