Art Basel and BMW have chosen Astha Butail (represented by GALLERYSKE, New Delhi, Bangalore) as the next BMW Art Journey winner. The international jury selected her unanimously from a shortlist of three artists whose works were exhibited in the Discoveries sector at this year’s Art Basel show in Hong Kong.
Asthma Butail Image courtesy of BMW Art Journey
Astha Butail’s winning project titled ‘In the Absence of Writing’ is concerned with memory and living traditions that are passed down through teaching and oral poetry. It, in the artist’s words, will be ‘a homage to the intangible oral traditions that are still alive today.’ Butail’s research on systems of cultures started in 2009, when she began learning Sanskrit and memorized a collection of hymns. For the BMW Art Journey, Butail plans to investigate the Zoroastrian Avesta, Jewish Oral Torah and Indian Veda traditions by observing and recording their different memory techniques and interviewing scholars and practitioners of each tradition. The journey will lead through the cities of Yazd (Iran), Jerusalem (Israel), London (United Kingdom), Varanasi, Pune, New Delhi and Mumbai (India).
The international experts who chose Butail’s proposal are Claire Hsu, Director, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; Bose Krishnamachari, President, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India; Matthias Mühling, Director, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich; Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator of Asian Art, and Senior Advisor, Global Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Pauline J. Yao, Curator, Visual Art, M+, Hong Kong.
In addition to Astha Butail, the shortlisted artists from the Discoveries sector for emerging artists at the 2017 Art Basel show in Hong Kong were Julian Charrière, represented by Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Berlin and Lin Ke, represented by BANK, Shanghai.
The next round of selections for the BMW Art Journey will take place during the 2017 edition of Art Basel in Miami Beach, where on December 7, 2017 the three shortlisted artists from the Positions sector will be announced. The next winner of the BMW Art Journey will be presented in spring 2018.
About The Artist
Astha Butail, born in 1977 in Amritsar, lives and works in Gurgaon, India. Central to her artistic practice is the use of geometry as a means of inquiry to understand how different composite elements of an entity relate to its whole. Her themes are memory and time, the idea of the archive and collaborative authorship. At Art Basel in Hong Kong 2017 Butail presented her work ‘Turning towards pure white’ (2017) including an assemblage of wall and floor based elements as well as framed panels, three-dimensional pieces extruded from the picture plane and a participatory book. Butail’s debut solo exhibition was shown at GALLERYSKE, Bangalore. Recent group exhibitions include Experimenter, Kolkata, Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, and Masquelibros Artists’ Book Fair, Madrid.
