Saturday 16 September 2006, 13.00–15.00

In this durational performance Monali Meher wears a half-sari and her body is partly covered with gold leaf. Meher wanders between art works in the Idea and Object wing with a stick attached to a magnifying glass, moving from room to room and reading a text she has written out loud as well as interacting with the various art works.

The title plays on the word ‘kiss’, which for the artist, is an expression of love for another, as well as for her homeland. It also alludes metaphorically to the spoken word. Meher’s text reflects her experience of Mumbai and its cultural relationship with the art works in the museum.

– Arshiya Lokhandwala, 2006

Tate Modern  Level 5 East
Free, no bookings taken

  

Biographies

Monali Meher was born in Pune, India. In 1990 she graduated from Sir JJ School of Arts, Mumbai with a BFA in painting. In 1998 she received the ‘Unesco-Aschberg’ Residency by Vienna Federal Chancellery for the Arts and Science. There she researched time and space in her work and began working with the process of decay. In 1998 she made her first performance, Reflect, A personal window display. In 2000–1 she was accepted at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, funded by a Dutch ministry of foreign affairs and Nuffic, Huygens grant. Her work has been published in books and magazines including Student Body by Marina Abramović, Third Text, Love & Death, and an Egon Schiele catalogue (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam). For last seven years she has been working with performance, video, photography and installation. Since 2000 she has been living and working in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Arshiya Lokhandwala was the founder and curator (1995–2002) of the Lakeeren Art Gallery in Mumbai. She was the recipient of the Charles Wallace India Trust award in 2000/1 for an MA in Creative Curating at Goldsmiths College, London. She was a participant at the Documenta 11 Education programme in Kassel in 2002, under the artistic curator Okwui Enwezor. She is currently a PhD candidate in the History of Art department at Cornell University, USA, and also works as an independent curator and critic.

See also:

  UBS Openings: Saturday Live: Mapping Mumbai   Saturday 16 September 2006

  UBS Openings: Saturday Live: Encounter(s): Tejal Shah and Varsha Nair   Saturday 16 September 2006   free

  UBS Openings: Saturday Live: Migration and [Dis]location   Saturday 16 September 2006

  UBS Openings: Saturday Live: D'Archetypes, Sujata Goel and Tarek Halaby, and Mukul   Saturday 16 September 2006   free