Nandita Mukand
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Flowers with their own stories

7/10/2017

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Excerpt from the OpenART 2017, Sweden Biennale catalogue
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​The catalogue shares some of the stories behind the flowers that were contributed for my installation "Blossom Flourish Wither Perish"

"....Used items carry memories. They have a history, some more clear than others, says Kerstin Wagner, assistant curator, and then shares a special story.
A woman came to the office at Kopmangatan and dropped off an IKEA bag filled with dried flowers. The flowers turned out to be gifts from her late husband and other gifts.
The woman had a hard time separating herself from the flowers, but when she knew that an artist would be able to use them, it made the whole process easier.She brought her bridal bouquet in and asked if we wanted that as well.
The woman Kerstin talks about is Lena Wickberg and when she heard Open Art was collecting flowers, she decided to donate her own collection. Lena started collecting flowers when she and her husband moved in together in the late 1980s. On top of a blue cabinet she put flowers from birthday parties, some of which she had grown in the garden of her country house, and gifts. When they moved to a new apartment, the cabinet and the flowers came along with them and slowly, but surely, the collection grew.

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They are getting more and more fragile and of course drier by the day, but they are amazingly beautiful, especially the roses, says Lena.
In September, it will be two years since her husband passed away and Lena started thinking about what she would do with the apartment, and with the flowers when she heard about OpenArt needing flowers.
The flowers have such a sentimental value to me that it felt great to be able to give them to the art instead of throwing them in the bin, Lena says. There's hardly anything left of my bridal bouquet from my first marriage; it's mostly just wires and a few roses and corn flowers- they get very fragile when you dry them- so I am very excited to see what the artist can do with them.
Lena, who paints with watercolors herself, believes the connection to art through the donations is very important to the people of Orebro. Art should be close to people who otherwise might not get the chance, can actually meet the art. Lena says that she is very inspired by the fantastic ideas the artists have and that they inspire people to be creative and even a little crazy..."
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Petri #4 : Repurposing Nostalgia

1/18/2016

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A refurbished shophouse along Petain Road served as an apt site for the contemplation & interrogation of the nature of the past – more specifically, a wistful view of the past.

The rare chance to exhibit with 20 of Singapore's most exciting emerging voices in contemporary art within a single venue made this show one I will always remember with my own blend of nostalgia . From drawings to photography, installations to performance art, there was something to be discovered in every nook & corner.

Given the innate psychological need for stability, nostalgia offers an alluring coping mechanism in the face of ever-accelerating changes. The proliferation of nostalgia-oriented commercial enterprises as well as urgent questions about the past, our experience & relationship to it dominating Singapore's artistic discourse are but responses to this oft-overwhelming situation.

Repurposing Nostalgia was a showcase of various artistic strategies in co-opting or challenging the nostalgic phenomenon. This diversity also reflected on how the show grew from ground up, with friends roping in friends or acquaintances through face-to-face meetings, texts, emails & social media (this post is adapted from the exhibition text)



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I exhibited the work "Connections" at this show
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"Exploring BigCi" Exhibition at the Hawkesbury Regional Gallery

6/26/2015

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The “Exploring BigCi" exhibition curated by Diana Robson was a special experience for me. I was honoured to be Hawkesbury Regional Gallery's first international artist-in-residence. During the course of the installation I got to know several of the wonderful people working at the gallery . I also had the opportunity to meet with some amazing artists –Nicola Moss and Kath Fries from Australia and Claudia Leuke from Germany.
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The work for the exhibition was derived from another work I had done last year in a residency context at BigCi (photograph on the right). Adapting a site specific work to a gallery context was an interesting challenge. 
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In the first version of this work the plants were hung within a shed-like building that opens onto the forest and so the forest and its greenery are the context within which the work is seen . The plants were collected from the forest floor outside. So if I ran out of raw materials I just had to take a walk into the surrounding forests and collect some more. Creating the work in the gallery at Windsor however meant that the plants had to be collected from the Blue Mountains and transported to the gallery. It became important to ensure enough plants were collected before-hand. Also gallery installation time was limited and I had to react to the new space relatively quickly and build most of the installation within a few days. Luckily I had a lot of support from volunteers and staff to help me collect the plants, transport them as well as carry out the actual work of installation. 
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I was eager to see how I could adapt the work to respond to the gallery space. This time round I was keen to create the plant screens as though floating in space. Also instead of a single high screen, this time I layered the work by allowing the screens to be seen through each other and also by letting the plants interact with their own shadows.
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I also integrated the shadows of the work on the wall with a wall drawing and collage of plants.
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The installation “Dead Plants Don't Grow 2” and the wall drawing “Unknown, Unsung” are intended to be viewed together and to play off each other.
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 Starting from shadows, to pencil drawing, the wall drawings were made progressively stronger. They acquire colour as they move away from the shadows of the plant installation. The brilliant colours in the wall drawings are intended to balance the dense browns in the deadplant installation. To view the finished works click "Dead Plant's Don't Grow 2" and "Unknown, Unsung"
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The Making of "The Tree and Me"

4/24/2015

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In the hurly burly of everyday city life I often long for that experience of connection, of deep stillness, that comes when one is in natural surroundings.

When in nature I am particularly fascinated with old trees. I often stop walking and look at them for ages. I have sketchbooks upon sketchbooks filled with sketches and writings about trees. The act of focused observation brings about a deepened awareness of nature and of the moment in time.

My imagination is tickled by the fact that old trees have been around for generations before I was born-they have eavesdropped on the secrets, heartaches and fears of those who came before and they will probably be standing tall when my own life and all its components so precious to me today are over. There is something oddly centering in this reflection.

Nature and its processes are unresting and also unhurried. The more I focus on this vein of thinking the more I am aware of a depth in the processes of the universe that makes our petty everyday concerns seem like surface ripples.

Some of this idea of the ephemerality of our walking the earth is expressed in these studio experiments. Made out of newspaper and grass these empty footprints mark absence, loss and fragility of existence.

Newspaper with all of its stories is the very essence of worldliness. It also epitomizes the ephemeral as its value is over as soon as it has been read. In this work I have dissolved newspaper into organic materials-grass, henna, vegetable wastes, coffee, to contemplate upon the fleeting nature of worldly concerns in the face of the more pervasive nature of universal forces.

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The processes of preparing the materials by boiling with chemicals draws upon  traditional techniques for paper making from vegetable material
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The very act of building up the work one layer at a time, waiting for it to dry before the next layer could be applied began to mimic the processes of the natural world. The structure took months to complete.
The smaller sculptural forms scattered at the base are each the negative form within my own fist reflecting upon the futility of trying to grasp things which would inevitably slip through ones fingers. To see these more clearly as well as to see the finished work click here: The Tree and Me 

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    Nandita Mukand is a Singapore-based artist.  Her work deals with the  relationship with Nature and  spirituality from within the contemporary urban context. She employs materiality to question the impact urban life has on our experience of time and the meaning we give to our own existence.

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