Krishnakriti : A Statement of Purpose
The objective of the Kalakriti Art Gallery is to nurture creativity in the visual arts, and to support the initiatives of creativity and understanding in the cultural sphere, with a special focus on fostering Hyderabad�s art scene and connecting it to larger developments in India and internationally. The Krishnakriti Arts and Culture Festival is an annual expression of this objective.
The year 2008 marks the fifth edition of the Festival, which is dedicated to the memory of the late Sri Krishnachandra B. Lahoti, and is organised by Kalakriti with the Lahoti Foundation.
Krishnakriti Art Festival
The Festival is intended to celebrate three abiding refinements of life -- art, culture and education -- and to share these with as many people as possible. To this end, the Festival is woven around an Art Camp whose participants are drawn from India as well as overseas. The artists who took part in the Art Camp are enclosed separately.
The Festival also offered a plethora of cultural activities, including a classical music Theatre, Art Talk, Screening of movies and a series of talks on the visual arts and their place in contemporary culture.
Linking Philanthropy and Aesthetics
The aim of the annual Art Camp and the Auction of art-works produced during the Camp is to combine the philanthropic and the aesthetic impulses. While the Camp is intended to provide a platform where artists can come together in a collegial spirit, find pause from their normal schedules, and to pursue their artistic explorations, the Auction connects the artists to the wider society in which they function.
The proceeds of the Auction go towards supporting the education of deserving young arts students. This commitment will find one of its most heartening long-term outcomes in the form of the Fellows, the students whose education is supported by endowments made by the Kalakriti Art Gallery and the Lahoti Foundation. In this way, Kalakriti affirms its dedication to the future of Indian art.
Sensibility and Its Fruits
The artists who participated in the Art Camp hosted as the centrepiece of the Krishnakriti Festival belong to diverse artistic lineages, live and work in various parts of Indian and the world, practise in a variety of genres and media. What holds their work together is not a common theme or a homogeneity of purpose, nor yet a shared ideological position. On the contrary, they are united precisely by their ability to treat the project of image making as an open-ended enterprise, a journey without a destination, in which the discoveries made along the route are their own reward.
Whether in terms of formal and conceptual experiment, or through a dedication to the refinement of certain core convictions, the participating artists attest to a process by which the imagination constantly renews itself and reshapes its objects.
This is the finest and most important lesson that art can teach humankind at large: that the self is not made more secure by its entrenchment in a few clear certitudes; but rather, that it grows through ceaseless self-questioning, fresh beginnings, new encounters with reality. What we see, as the results of the Art Camp, are the fruits of such a sensibility -- manifested through the work of otherwise quite distinctively positioned artists.
