A View To Infinity: Nasreen Mohamedi

Speaker: Roobina Karode

September 20, 2013 | 6.30 pm
Auditorium, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai

Nasreen Mohamedi (1937 – 1990) created her own distinctive style as an abstractionist at a time when the tendency was towards figurative and representative idioms. With an intense awareness of the self and the body moving in time, the emphasis of her work was on space, inspired by geometry, architecture, textiles, and also deserts and structures found in Nature. Travel provided an essential source of inspiration for Mohamedi, who photographed and kept diaries throughout her life. The retrospective exhibition – A View to Infinity’ at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art examines her oeuvre through drawings, paintings, photographs and collages, underlining the aesthetic vision found in her diary notes.

As the curator of this ongoing exhibition, Roobina Karode will expound on the curatorial challenges and choices she made in the shaping of the exhibition and share her ongoing formulations on Mohamedi’s distinctive art pedagogy and practice. As her student at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda, and as her neighbour, Karode came to know the artist very closely through many interactions from 1977 to 1990. Having spent long hours at her studio-cum home, she will be sharing the artist’s persona through personal anecdotes and rare insights into the self-evolving discipline of Nasreen Mohamedi – her art and life.

Roobina Karode has post-graduate specializations in Art History and in Education. She is an educator, writer and curator, and has over the years been involved with the teaching of Art History, both Indian and Western, at various institutions. She continues to contribute essays and reviews to art journals and is currently the Director and Chief Curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi.