Vogue- Art season is here—20 virtual and gallery shows across India you need to check out now

Tarq is presenting a solo exhibition of Sameer Kulavoor titled You Are all Caught Up. Kulavoor's current work is made up of a series of paintings and drawings that are an expression of the artist's understanding of the tumultuous historical moment that we are currently experiencing. He continues to be fascinated with social media, and looks deeply at ideas of the personal and political through the ubiquitous blue screen.

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Mid-day- The canvas of our time

Artist Sameer Kulavoor traverses the age of social media, political movements and the pandemic in his new solo exhibition opening tomorrow in a Colaba gallery The title, YOU ARE ALL CAUGHT UP (a message that pops up on Instagram after you've seen every post on your feed in the last 48 hours), he tells us, was a struggle to arrive at, but proved to be a good fit as it encompassed the personal and the po­litical, coupled with some ambiguity.

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Mint Lounge- Sameer Kulavoor’s new show investigates the way we view the world through a screen

One of the most striking works at the new show, ‘You Are All Caught Up’, at Tarq, Mumbai, is I Like it. What is It? People from all walks of life can be seen pointing their mobile phones to the ground to document something, which seems invisible to the naked eye. There is to be an urgency to their actions, as if the failure to capture the fleeting moment will have drastic repercussions. The work is part of artist Sameer Kulavoor’s ongoing investigation of the impact of social media and the merging of the personal and political through the ubiquitous blue screen.

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AD- Mumbai: This exhibition at TARQ explores personal and political ideas through the lens of social media

‘You Are All Caught Up’—Sameer Kulavoor's second solo documents life in the urban metropolis as well as our restless mental state during a time of political turmoil

Two years ago, Sameer Kulavoor’s first solo exhibition ‘A Man of the Crowd’ held at TARQ was the Mumbai-based visual artist’s unique observation of urban spaces and the people who inhabit those spaces. A lot has happened since then and his second solo show brings under the scanner, personal and political ideas. “We have seen protests, concerns around privacy, censorship, the worrisome problem of fake news and its effects, the media circus. Most works in the show revolve around these themes with social media and devices being the catalyst,” he says of his new exhibition, ‘You Are All Caught Up’.

Impact on Art

Like the rest of the world, it was a strange time for the artist, who felt disoriented during the initial few weeks of the lockdown. “News and social media updates were gloomy with different kinds of humanitarian crises unfolding. I was away from home and studio and did not have access to most of my work materials,” he recalls. Slowly adjusting to the new ways of working, Kulavoor decided to shield himself from news, moved out of Mumbai for a month with his partner and began to find some rhythm—work wise and otherwise. It was natural that the situation would have an impact on the artist’s work as well. “The pandemic made me focus less on figurative work and instead I turned my attention to dystopian and non-representational versions of man-made structures (architecture, infrastructure) and their functions. I returned to watercolours after a very long time—probably after more than a decade,” he shares.

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Platform – YOU ARE ALL CAUGHT UP

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Mint Lounge- A fine balance: a note from the editor

Despite the struggle, entrepreneurship is an opportunity for expression, and the pandemic has provided a chance for some founders to do just that. They are among the most striking works in Mumbai artist Sameer Kulavoor’s impressive new show, You Are All Caught Up. 58 and I Like It. What Is It? remind us that we spend most of our lives glued to screens, consuming and being consumed by food, caffeine, work, news, information, rumour. The show examines the impact, both physical and psychological, of social media on our lives (read the review on mintlounge.in), but many of the canvases just as easily tell the story of our dependence on screens.

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Art India Magazine: Lockdown Diaries- That Feeling of Disquiet

60 days of brutal lockdown meant that our only access to the outside world was through our devices- which meant a constant barrage of news and updates fed to us by algorithms. COVID news from around the world was getting gloomier with the number of cases rising exponentially and with it, my anxiety. Particularly, this one night I felt breathless and sleepless- imagining that I had fever.

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Domus- Art and Politics. Locked. Unlocked

The recent body of work by graphic designer and artist Sameer Kulavoor currently on show at the Mumbai-based gallery Tarq is a fitting reflection on the last one year we have had. The lockdown following the Covid-19 pandemic has been bookended between two crucial protests – the student protests against the NRC and CAA bills that began in December 2019 and the protest by framers going on just now against bills by the central government again. What has life – the life of the individual and the public life meant for all of us, or anyone of us in this one year. This one year has made us realise how frivolous we are in certain ways as a civilization and a society, and how incapable and undeveloped we are as professional societies be it medicine, governance, or politics.

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Mumbai Mirror- Unwind: A culture vulture

This is artist Sameer Kulavoor’s second solo exhibition at Tarq. The show comprises a series of paintings and drawings that are an expression of the artist's understanding of life during a pandemic. These works also highlight Kulavoor’s fascination with social media, exploring how and why people adapt to the times by consuming content — readily available at one’s fingertips which often leads to an information overload.

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The Odd One- Societal Structures

Sameer Kulavoor is back at TARQ with his latest exhibition “You Are All Caught Up” where he displays his newest pieces created before and during the COVID-19 lockdown. Buildings are transformed into geometric shapes. These shapes are also used to represent our obsession with technology or the invisible presence of social media in our lives. “It was also the only way left to connect while in isolation” says Kulavoor and is a thread of commonality between the themes he has drawn on.

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Art dose Podcast with Sameer Kulavoor

Mumbai based artist Sameer Kulavoor’s solo show ‘YOU ARE ALL CAUGHT UP’ opened last week at Tarq. The series of paintings and drawings in the show delve deeper and explore our use of social media in these extraordinary times. Sameer has used the personal and the political to express what he feels. In some of the other works in the exhibition, he has continued his exploration of the urban landscape around him in the changed scenario of the pandemic. We caught up with him to know more.

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AD – The MOOD

IN BETWEEN SETTING UP HIS ONGOING SHOW AT TARQ, THE VISUAL ARTIST PUTS TOGETHER A MOOD BOARD OF THE OBJECTS THAT INSPIRE HIM

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Indian Express- How boredom can make us do creative things

The pandemic revealed what researchers have long known — ennui could be the gateway to re-engaging with the world

Kulavoor’s figure, on the other hand, appears opiated, preferring to do anything not to “think”. It’s also one of the key reasons why people fear getting bored. Who knows what questions, what memories the mind will bring to the surface in a quiet moment? The pandemic, for instance, has been a live lab for researchers, with latest studies showing the link between emotional trauma and boredom, and how highly boredom-prone people are more likely to endorse that Covid-19 is a hoax. It’s why the idea that boredom can be a source of creativity is a tricky one. Eastwood, founder of Boredom Lab in Toronto, says that the link between boredom and creativity is indirect, accomplished if we allow for constructive mind wandering. He explains that when bored, we disengage from the world, and if we can tolerate the discomfort of boredom long enough to turn inward and reflect on who we are and how we want to express ourselves in the world, then this might allow us to form new ideas for how we can re-engage with the world.

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Hindustan Times- Humour: A hazy shade of winter

Art Escape: On a recent drive into Colaba, I treated myself to a twin art escape, all the more exciting for it being a truant Tuesday. Sameer Kulavoor’s You Are all Caught Up at the Tarq gallery in Apollo Bunder was worth the advance booking – here’s an artist whose colourful canvases, in the grand tradition of unfettered art, neither wear masks nor use sanitiser. Having had my fill of the poetry and protest of his pandemic-inspired – necessitated? – art, I lost myself in Chirodeep Chaudhuri’s Seeing Time: Public Clocks of Bombay at Project 88 gallery. From a 1700s clock in the naval dockyard, to a late 19th century still ticking in the first quadrangle of my alma mater, St. Xavier’s College, the black-and-white photo exhibition was part history lesson, part time travel. Long live art galleries and the many freedoms they foster.

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It’s Nice That – Sameer Kulavoor’s paintings depict large-scale, bustling metropolises

The Mumbai-based artist talks us through his geometric works, rooted on the grounds of politics and socio-economic experiences. The portfolio of Mumbai-based artist Sameer Kulavoor is replete with large-scale, geometric metropolises – the type of work that gives a gentle nod to Picasso’s cubism for the ways in which it contrasts reality with painting. Within these pieces, you’ll find buildings, city streets and the people that occupy them composed in a myriad of mediums, all of which explore the impact of time, culture, politics and socio-economic conditions on our surroundings.

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Design India – Born out of the mundane

Inspired to create by everyday life, Sameer Kulavoor turned his back on an established design career to give all his attention to art.

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Art India: Cellphone Victims and other Viral Stories

Kulavoor’s new show You Are All Caught Up invites viewers to behold the compulsive human need to consume every morsel of image, text and sound to the point of exhaustion. Any relief from these digital entanglements is only temporary. It is shattered all too easily by the next notification.

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