Art Plural Gallery established the Emerging Artists Programme in early 2012 to promote the work of promising artists at an early stage of their career. The programme offered the selected artist his first solo show in the unique space of the gallery. Art Plural Gallery’s commitment to emerging artists is made possible thanks to the support from corporate partners Gereje Corporate Finance and Vandaalen Wealth Managers, and private partner Ian Dunderdale.
“We see it as our commitment to the regional arts scene to propel the careers of up-and-coming artists,” comments Frédéric de Senarclens, CEO of Art Plural Gallery. “Siddhartha Tawadey is a talented artist and we are very proud to share his compelling and evocative works with a larger audience.”
Siddhartha Tawadey was the first artist to be exhibited under this programme. Hailing from Calcutta, India and educated in London’s Central Saint Martins, Tawadey has won several photography awards and recently had a solo exhibition in New York City.
For the Emerging Artists Programme, Tawadey premiered his photography series Sans Souci, literally translated from French as ‘without worries’. Shot in an abandoned mansion on an undisclosed location, Sans Souci creates an ambiguous space in which to explore notions of beauty, memory and history. The series of ten prints presents a compelling portrait of a place in time and a way of life at once fading and being reinvented with each new season. Poetic focus on relics of an indelible past draws from the viewer a sensation or memory, allowing fluid narratives to form in a visual setting of stasis and decay.
Making historical reference to the summer palace of the same name of Prussian King Frederick the Great, who wished to live out his personal and artistic interests there ‘sans souci’, Tawadey wanted to create his own palace of artistic interest and illusion through this inspiring residence.
“I have an inclination in my art to delve into history and recover the old, the tarnished, the rusted, the unnoticed and bring it back to life. To claim a ruin is often to exalt it,” says Tawadey. “Beauty is often hidden in the most unlikely of spaces and the series wants to uncover it, through the imagery of the mansion as an art object.”
As part of the exhibition, Art Plural Gallery organised an artist talk titled 'Space for Conversation' on Thursday, 16th August 2012 at 7pm. Siddhartha Tawadey and local artist Sherman Ong engaged in a discussion on the notion of space, the role of the artist and the position of photography in Contemporary art.