Technology, visual art, high fashion, and literature merged on the same stage last week at the closing night event for the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) New York Edition, curated by cultural producer Myna Mukherjee of Engendered, a trans-national arts and human rights organization based in New Delhi. After a hiatus of 10 years, Engendered returned to New York City’s High Nine Gallery in Chelsea with Techné Disruptors, a hand-picked NFT collection featuring some of South Asia’s most cutting-edge artists, including Ram Rahman, Waswo X. Waswo, Veer Munshi, Raghava KK, Puneet Kaushik, Harshit Agrawal, Nur Mahammed, Balbir Krishan, Amritah Sen, among others.
Co-presented by Avid Learning and High Line Nine Gallery and powered by Technology Partner, Polygon, the show has been conceived through the lens of urbanism and a post-colonial gaze. It engages Indian futurisms, indigenous technologies, and future-forward aesthetics while retaining the notion of cultural perpetuity. Techné Disruptors is coming to New York after celebrating unprecedented success in its first outing in New Delhi (April-May 2022). The show not only helped reshape sedentary categories of art but also radically shifted the way art is viewed, understood, experienced, and sold. For the first time, over 80% of a largely digital exhibition was collected by one of India’s most reputed institutional collectors.
The closing reception of JLF, featured the NFT book launch of Seema Kohli’s “Mitr Pyaare Nu,” as well as closing remarks from Managing Director, Teamwork Arts Sanjoy Roy and Indian politician Shaiza Ilmi. The evening concluded with a fashion show presented by South Asian New York Fashion Week (SANYFW), showcasing the designs of Untitled by Nikita, AKS Mathur, Aara by Sana, Aazadi by Naseer Khan and Pakistani headliner Nomi Ansari.
The three-week-long event in Chelsea Arts District with rotating exhibitions (a new chapter each week) features works imagined with the most future-forward technologies of our times including AI (Artificial Intelligence), AR (Augmented Reality), VR (Virtual Reality), holographs, and works from brand new minted collections of Global South NFTs curated with a critical need to strengthen south-south collaborations.
The exhibition looks at the bridging of the old and the new, the physical and the digital, and lends voice to largely invisibilized conversations and personal stories in the complex landscape of gender, sexuality & marginalities. It speaks to the cultural consequences of migrations within, from, and to the Indian subcontinent as artistic inquiries into difference and belonging.
The artists include: Seema Kohli | Veer Munshi | Ram Rahman | Puneet Kaushik | Waswo X. Waswo | Amina Ahmed | 64/1: Raghava KK & Karthik Kalyanaraman | Harshit Agrawal | Balbir Krishan | Amritah Sen | Babak Haghi | Ritu Kamath | Nur Mahhamed | ‘Rharha’ Rochelle Nembhard | Minne Atairu | Satadru Sovan | Abhishek Singh | SK Sahni | Mahula Ghosh | Adil B. Khan | Santosh K. Das | Sukanya Ayde | Portia Roy | Mandakini Devi | Aamir Rabbani | Arvin Ombika | Ahsan Masood | Baishali Chetia | Chathuri Nissansala | Dominique V. Castelano | Ipshita Thakur | Isha Yadav | Sawan Taank | Mohd Shazeb
