Session 08: Oscillations and Dissonance

The Fabulation Project

Date - 17 JAN 25

Time - 6.30pm onwards

Location - KNMA Saket

Join us for yet another engaging session from our artist talk series: THE FABULATION PROJECT. It is a series of conversations and encounters exploring contemporaneity in the arts practices, that are also a work of story making for a 'people to come', stories which they shall inherit. In an attempt to contextualise contemporary art practice this series of talks engages with the storyteller and story making as central and crucial to the discourses. So, we try to unravel layers of an artist’s body of work and look for what they narrate (or choose not to) about the times we live in.

The talk series is curated by Neha Tickoo, Associate Curator, KNMA

The program will be followed by light refreshments.

Artists Thukral & Tagra present their body of work and will be in conversation with writer, publisher and artist Chirag Thakkar.

Thukral and Tagra are a Delhi-based artist duo comprising Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra. Driven by the artistic methodologies of painting, gaming, archiving, and publishing, their multifaceted studio practice reflects the scope of engagement in the cultural and political landscape of India and the world. While their early career work dealt with the intricacies of consumer culture globally, their recent interest in ecology and climate change is a revisiting of their family histories of migration and farming in the Indian state of Punjab.

Through and beyond their studio practice, Thukral & Tagra create new formats of public engagement and attempt to expand the threshold of what art can do. These also include the non-profit Foundation that addresses ongoing social issues through education and art, their collaborative learning lab Pollinator that fosters cross-pollinations across creative fields, and the new publishing and distribution platform and Archive that reconfigures the potential of the print and the archive. Further, their immersive and multi-modal sensory installations offer seamless accessibility to audiences from varied backgrounds and approaches, breaking through the spectatorial protocols of “high art.”

Chirag Thakkar the moderator for this session is a writer, artist and publisher based in Delhi. He publishes some of the finest Indian nonfiction and fiction at Bloomsbury India as their Associate Publisher. Chirag has previously been with Penguin Random House India, Roli Books, and Oxford University Press India. His writing has appeared in Scroll, Hindustan Times, Kashmir Reader, The Voice of Fashion, and The Quint. In his performance work, Chirag is interested in areas of climate change, citizenship and dissent, among others. Chirag Thakkar responded to Thukral & Tagra’s most recent show Arboretum with a guest essay and a performance art intervention at Nature Morte in the fall of 2024.