Arshiya Lokhandwala is an art historian, curator and founder of Lakeeren Art Gallery (1995–2003) in Mumbai India. She completed her BA and MA in Sociology in 1986 and 1991 respectively. She is the recipient of the Charles Wallace India Trust award in 2001 for an MA in Creative Curating at Goldsmiths College, London. Lokhandwala was a participant at the Documenta 11 Education program in Kassel in 2002, under the artistic curator Okwui Enwezor. She is also a curatorial committee member of the Arts Pension Trust [1].
Lokhandwala curated Rites/Rights/Rewrites: Women's Video Art, which traveled to Cornell University, Duke University, and Rutgers University from 2003–06. She is currently a PhD candidate in the History of Art department at Cornell University, under Salah Hassan USA, and writes on the globalization of art, feminism, performance art and new media. Having returned to Mumbai, India in 2009 Lokhandwala has reopened Lakeeren Art Gallery in a new South Mumbai location Colaba. Her opening exhibition All that’s Solid Melts into Air: Indian Contemporary Art in Global Times, includes the work of Atul Dodiya, Sheela Gowda, Subodh Gupta, N. S. Harsha, Jitish Kallat, Kausik Mukhopadhyay, Justin Ponmany, Sharmila Samant, T V Santosh.
As a gallerist, Arshiya Lokhandwala founded one of the first contemporary art galleries to be established in the western suburbs of Mumbai, India, with a specific vision. Its innovative concept provided the much-needed impetus for showcasing new, avant-garde contemporary art in India, especially since the mid-1990s posed a difficult moment for Indian contemporary art. The gallery was one of the pioneers to exhibit installation art, photography, video and web-based art. It also generated a strong agency for art education by creating its independent forums on art, which included inviting speakers to talk on various issues. Lakeeren, was also one of the first to curate and organize its own outdoor art festival, Jagruti, a commemoration of 50 years of Indian Independence (1996): that promoted a crossing-over between various art forms, namely art, dance, film, and music, as well as presenting installation art to local audiences.
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Lakeeren Art Gallery opened in 1995 in Vile Parle as one the first galleries to exist outside the South Mumbai, Kala Ghoda art circuit.
The gallery’s uniqueness was that it challenged itself to present Avant-garde Indian Art that emerged at that moment in time to a new audience outside the usual South Mumbai collector’s circle through the compelling vision and skill of the Founder/ Director, Arshiya Lokhandwala. The Gallery has exhibited more than 65 shows which include artists like Sharmila Samant, Surekha, Monali Meher, Tushar Joag, Kausik Mukhopadhyay, Baiju Parthan, Jyotee, Atul Dodiya, Krishnamachari Bose amongst others.
Although Lakeeren Art Gallery physically closed its doors in 2003, as Arshiya Lokhandwala had decided to pursue a PhD at Cornell University in History of Art (poised with a degree in Creative Curating from Goldsmiths College, London, 2001), it opened an “intellectual” space that expanded its art historical and curatorial enterprise oeuvre to include global art practices in its agenda. This expanded vision of the gallery could be interpreted in extending Lakeeren’s “lines” as connecting nodes, or in the words of philosophers Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to be considered within “rhizomatic” frame of reference to establish new relationships outside predictable connections in a global art space.
This allowed the dismantling of relationships that are questionable and that no longer work such as the genres of art and ghettoization of art as a national project. It further extended this rhizomatic way of thinking to allow cross-overs that intersect many aspects of the various practices as a gallerist, curator and art historian creating a unique “third space” that allows a Gallerist to engage and push these areas to another level of interaction.
The impact and influence of Lakeeren gallery and the artists would be lost in the innards of time if not revisited or articulated as a story that needed to be told. This is particularly relevant given the current moment of globalization experienced by Indian art that can be traced back to the liberalization of the Indian economy that began in the early 1990s, the time when Lakeeren opened as a gallery. This moment of pre-globalization of Indian art was a time when the explosion of new material and media was visible in the works of younger artists, in which significant experimentation in photography, video, web based and installation art came to be viewed. The artists sought to employ unorthodox mediums such as rice paper, egg cartons, found objects, making Lakeeren one of the first galleries to exhibit this new genre of art, kitsch, ephemeral, sculptural, performance art practices that were in the process of being defined. This newfound materiality also needed a new understanding towards art and art object itself, leading the gallery to adopt a mission statement to create a “social forum for the appreciation of art and art forms through knowledge based interaction by not only exhibiting art, but also providing a much needed intellectual platform.”
Lakeeren, in its eight years of existence, presented over 65 group and solo exhibitions including Cinemascape: An Artist’s Tribute to 100 years of Cinema, 1996, The Looking Glass Self: An Exhibition of Contemporary Self Portraits, 1997, The Tale of Six Cities: Glimpsing the Lives of Six Women Artists, as well as solo works by Shilpa Gupta, Sharmila Samant, Monali Meher, Archana Hande, Surekha, Baiju Parthan to name a few, who are some of the leading names in Indian contemporary art today.
Lakeeren Art Gallery reopened its doors after a sabbatical in its new Colaba location on 17 December 2009 with its inaugural exhibition titled All that Is Solid melts into Air: Indian Contemporary Art in Global Times. This exhibition highlights the changes that have taken place in Indian Contemporary Art since the late 1990s. In Marshall Berman’s seminal essay All that Is Solid Melts into Air(inspired from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto), he defines the changing nature of modern life based on capitalism’s need to constantly revolutionize itself in order to create new markets. This leaves nothing solid or permanent in its wake, reducing everything to the scepter of money. In the 21st century capitalism has transformed itself under the impact of the condensation of space and time resulting in the new global “empire.”
In the Indian context, All that Is Solid Melts into Air examines the effect of this contemporary globalization that has exposed the Indian artists to the international art world and influenced the material base of their work. The exhibition confronts this new empire of capitalism raising the question of “value,” both in terms of the financial aspect as well as an ethical standpoint of the changes taking place in our rapidly changing Indian landscape with its possible implications.
Through the work of Atul Dodiya, Sheela Gowda, Subodh Gupta, N. S. Harsha, Jitish Kallat, Kausik Mukhopadhyay, Justin Ponmany, Sharmila Samant, T V Santosh, All that Is Solid melts into Air attempts to question the specter of capitalism that manifests our existence today, bringing into close focus the question of value and commodity exchange within the changing Indian landscape. The gallery continues to exhibit the avant-garde within the contemporary arts with a strong emphasis on curatorial and theoretical practices within the arts.