Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation & Welham Old Boys Society are happy to invite you to
Remembering Leela Mukherjee
an evening of conversation with Nilima Sheikh, Ranbir Kaleka and Madan Gopal Singh
moderated by Noopur Desai
23 March, Saturday | 5pm
Vadehra Art Gallery, D-40 Defence Colony, New Delhi
The evening’s event is a special gathering of friends, students and admirers of Leela Mukherjee, who come together to remember and celebrate her legacy as a sculptor, teacher, mentor and friend. This event accompanies the retrospective exhibition “Leela Mukherjee –A Guileless Modernist” at Vadehra Art Gallery and the book by the same name published by Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation and Tulika Books.
The evening’s event also marks the launch of the “Leela Mukherjee Artist-Educator Grant”, a new grant instituted by the Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation with the support of Welham Old Boys’s Society. It is an annual grant that seeks to support artists-educators in India who are engaged in developing and running an art education project with school-aged children (5- 18 years of age), either within or outside the classroom. The grant encourages projects that integrate local knowledge, and lived environments and experiences into learning and teaching methods.
NILIMA SHEIKH is an extensively exhibited artist based in Baroda who brings a nuanced critical voice to her works based on issues of femininity, tradition and violence. She has conceived scenography for theatre, illustrated books for children, created a mural for the airport in Mumbai, and written insightfully on art for journals, catalogues and books, including a chapter in Contemporary Art in Baroda, published by Tulika Books in 1997.
MADAN GOPAL SINGH is a singer, poet, film theorist and composer, who has written and lectured extensively on cinema, art and cultural history. He leads the widely acclaimed music group Chaar Yaar, whose repertoire includes songs based on Punjabi, Sufi, traditional and contemporary poetry. He is also a prolific translator of poetry, and a professor of English, having taught English Literature for 42 years in Delhi. He wrote scripts for films such as Rasayatra (on Pt Mallikarjun Mansur), Name of a River (on Ritwik Ghatak), and dialogues and lyrics for Kayataran, Qissa, Khamosh Pani and Song of the Scorpion.
RANBIR KALEKA is an artist based in Delhi who is known for his paintings vibrant with phantasmagoria and epic disquiet, as well as a body of trans-media palimpsestual works that combine conceptualist sophistication with a calibrated opulence of image. His works have been exhibited at the 4th Guangzhou Triennial, the Media Art Lab in Moscow, Kunsthalle in Austria, the Venice Biennale, Asia Society New York and the Busan Museum of Modern Art in South Korea.