AMSHU CHUKKI

Department of Fine Arts, University of
Hyderabad - Visiting Artist talk - Hyderabad,
India

18 February, 2017

Workshop at College of Fine Arts, JNA&FAU, Hyderabad curated by Faiza Hassan for the Cochi Students’ Biennale

Curator - Faiza Hassan
Exploring ideas through the moving image
College of Fine Arts, JNA&FAU, Hyderabad
Resource person: Amshu Chukki
11 July, 2016- 14 July, 2016
A four day workshop was conducted at the College
of Fine Arts, in collaboration with Baroda based
artist Amshu Chukki that was spread over five days 
Between the 11th and the 15th of August, 2016.
Students worked with sites and objects from across the JNA&FAU campus, either constructing fictions 
around sites or developing ideas/work by means of small interventions, and thus allowing viewers to look at these otherwise familiar spaces differently. Alternatively, also allowing their work to be encountered by 
different audiences.
http://www.ficart.org/sb-2016-curator-led-workshops/

Forbes 30 under 30 2016
Amshu Chukki | 25
Video artist
Category: Art & Culture

Amshu Chukki loves reading stories. And telling them as well. Just that he chooses artworks, rather than just words, to narrate his tales.

Take, for instance, his work called ‘Mountain Man’. Created while on his residency with Khoj in Pune in 2015, which had taken place in an art deco building, the artwork tells the story of a man who disappeared into the mountain. This site-specific installation transforms the viewer into someone peeping in through a hole in the door of a Victorian bathroom, looking onto mounds of grass in the bathtub.

“I like to work with fiction that originates from spaces,” says Chukki. “Sometimes, when a space has stopped existing, or has changed entirely, it exists only in the minds of people, or in fiction.”

Chukki is exploring newer methods of storytelling through video art. For, even when his work is captured on video, it is not restricted to video itself. It incorporates other elements such as installations, projections, text and time-lapse images. He even uses tools, such as filters on Instagram, to lend a specific feel to his works. “Amshu is one of the most interesting artists I have seen,” says Mortimer Chatterjee, co-founder of Chatterjee & Lal, a Mumbai gallery that now officially represents Chukki. “He has a very wide worldview, which is something rare in someone so young. I would think it has something to do with the world he grew up in.”  

A graduate of MS University, Baroda, Chukki studied painting while in college. But video was something that always attracted him, perhaps that is why he was also a member of the college film club. “Video,” he says, “helps me move between different mediums and spaces.”

Chukki’s journey as an artist has taken him to the St Moritz Art Masters Residency Programme in 2014 at St Moritz, Switzerland, and the Darling Foundry, India-Québec Residency in 2015, apart from winning him a host of awards. His art has been exhibited at India: Maximum City at ChesaPlanta, Zuoz, St Moritz Art Masters 2014, in Switzerland, Art for Young Collectors III at Galerie Mirchandani+Steinruecke in Mumbai in 2014, and at Chatterjee & Lal in Mumbai in 2015.

Videos by Amshu Chukki and Chinmoyi Patel, a curated exhibition by Dominic Nurre, Helper Projects,
Brooklyn, New York

September 26 - October 25, 2015
Opening reception: Saturday, September 26, 7 - 10pm

http://helperprojects.com/helper_html/Videos-Chukki_Patel.html

Fonderie Darling - Resident Artist Talk - Montreal, Canada

Thursday, November 12, 2015 6 PM

http://fonderiedarling.org/en/Artist-Talk-Amshu-Chukki.html

Chateau Papillon des Arts - Artist Talk and Open Studio - St.Moritz, Switzerland

28 August, 2014
5:30pm - 7pm

"INDIA : MAXIMUM CITY"
PABLO BARTHOLOMEW, AMSHU CHUKKI, PRATUL DASH, RANBIR KALEKA, REENA SAINI KALLAT, MANISH NAI, GIGI SCARIA, MITHU SEN, SOONI TARAPOREVALA, HEMA UPADHYAY
Curated by Birgid Uccia

22.08.2014 - 31.08.2014

The rapid growth of India is best gauged by exploring its megacities with their complex entanglements of demographic shifts, modern technologies, and social disparities. In the post-colonial age the Indian metropolis has been undergoing dramatic transformation from an industrial to a postindustrial city, where manufacturing is replaced by a globalised network of capital and services. The changes in the urban landscape result in the segregation of urban areas, where protected zones for elite consumption and living coexist with slum dwellings for the urban poor. The spatial density of the population – mainly caused by rural migration – has created explosive social conditions. However, migrants who are living at the fringes of society are the backbone of the informal economy on which the formal economy largely depends.

‘India: Maximum City’ showcases the works of 10 artists, who address the numerous challenges of the Indian metropolis, for they assume a dual role as practitioners and urban citizens. In their daily life, they are confronted with an infrastructure that is strained to the point of collapse, the lack of proper urban planning, and gentrification. At the same time, they experience the Indian metropolis as a thriving place, a melting pot of infinite cultural diversity, where various communities of mixed language, religion and ethnicity coexist.

All the artists in the exhibition critically explore the social, political, architectural, and economic implications of the Indian city. As an evergrowing organism, it has a visual culture of its own, which also serves as a rich source of inspiration to them. They question the Indian metropolis as an unsustainable, ‘premature’ one, a city which is still in transition to a ‘proper urban modernity’. The works on display commonly raise the question, ‘Will the utopian dream of urban modernity ever be deemed liveable or will it end up in dystopia?’

- Birgid Uccia
Chesa Planta, Zuoz, St, Moritz, Switzerland