Decoding the boom in India’s digital art

India Art Fair’s first-ever Digital Artists in Residence programme spaes a lasting romance between art and technology in India

With one of the largest annual art events in the country, India Art Fair’s return to New Delhi’s NSIC Grounds, Okhla, is speckled with artsy escapades that explore new dimensions of identity, culture and existence, while touring the digital realm like never before. The fair’s first-ever Digital Artists in Residence programme spaes a lasting romance between art and technology in India.

Testing the waters, the fair made an open call for the programme under the theme ‘Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary’ last year. It received, as press coordinator Gautami Reddy puts it, an overwhelming response with “over 200 applications”. Out of these, only three tech artists — Gaurav Ogale, Mira Felicia Malhotra and Varun Desai — have made it to the fair’s Digital Residency Hub. The artists will showcase immersive digital projects and installations created on the iPad, while engaging with the audience in workshops and sessions presented by the culture and creative programme wing of Apple, Today at Apple.

“From the pandemic, we’ve witnessed an explosion in conversations around NFTs and tech-inspired art,” says fair’s director Jaya Asokan. She adds that a Tech x Art pavilion called The Studio will also showcase film and video artworks by over 15 artists, including Payal Arya, Aditi Kulkarni, Julien Segard and Shrimanta Saha, supported by The Gujral Foundation, Serendipity Arts Foundation and the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) respectively, each pushing the boundaries of creativity.

“We are progressing into a new digital reality,” says Varun Desai, an artist who works across a range of mediums, from electronic music production and engineering to creative coding and installation art. “I use code like a painter uses a paintbrush, as my primary tool,” he states. There is a method to his creative process. He has been toying with many applications designed specifically for iPad — from sound recording to sketching and 3D scanning through the LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensor on iPad Pro — he captures and generates 3D scans of spaces, instead of flat photographs.

As for visual artist and illustrator Mira Felicia Malhotra, women take centre stage. Her neon-tinted pop art works, titled Loag Kya Kahenge, are a rambunctious deviation from society’s conservative perception of ideal women. She says, “I want to show more women as bodybuilders, as space explorers, as angry women or even evil women — women occupying spaces in ways we don’t usually accept. I think this comes to me from my own fantasies, a desire to be able to live life in many ways.”

Weaving memories, artist, poet and writer Gaurav Ogale, brings extraordinary biographies of ordinary people through an audio-visual book anthology series ‘Bestsellers’. He creates short animated films that act like portals to another time and place. With no fixed studio space, Gaurav makes a corner for himself wherever he is — at home, a friend’s kitchen or at a residency in Goa or rural France. “I carry the objects that allow me to think and create,” he says, “not only tools like my iPad Pro on which I take to write and draw, but also the more sentimental objects that ground me.” He shows us some of these objects — a worn leather bound notebook from his school days, a ceramic bookmark collected in Marrakesh during a residency and a little bottle of perfume, a gift from his father.

On till February 12.