Melukote for a Day

Melukote, a temple town with a thousand-year history, is replete with water tanks, monastic institutions, major temples and large reservoirs. It is negotiating in the present the past and the future. Jackfruit’s tour is designed to allow groups traveling through southern India with Wilderness Travels and Exotic Journeys to experience Melukote’s architecture, music and cuisine in a day-long event that combines learning, sensuous pleasure and relaxation (www.wildernesstravel.com)

Varna Mythri: The Art of Rumale Chennabasaviah

Rumale Chennabasaviah (1910-1988) was a watercolour artist whose dedication to portraying the city of Bangalore, particularly its picturesque buildings and verdant flora, is renowned. Jackfruit was hired by the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bengaluru to work with independent curator K. S. Srinivasa Murthy to design the Rumale retrospective in 2011. Taking the collection held primarily by the Kabe family and a few Karnataka state institutions, Jackfruit’s task was to assist  the curator to make the final selection of works for the exhibition, design a display that worked with his curatorial premise and create visual relationships between the works in the NGMA gallery to showcase Rumale’s way of looking at and painting his city. The show was extended twice due to popular demand. Jackfruit was assisted by Little River Architects in this project.

Preview of Works by Ramesh Pithiya

Jackfruit curated a very successful show of gouache paintings by this young gay artist from Baroda. Ramesh Pithiya’s work is an exploration of the representation of gay life and art in Indiaand abroad, the artist’s positioning of his own identity and his theorizing of queerness. The show opening also presented a reading of selected texts on homosexuality and the struggle for rights by well-known theatre actor Ruchika Chanana through our Art of the Matter series on art and literature.

Its Good to be Queen, Mithu Sen

New Delhi-based artist Mithu Sen and her New York Gallery Bose Pacia (www.bosepacia.com) commissioned Jackfruit to design a publication for an installation project housed in an apartment in New York City. The task was to create something that had the regularity of a diary, the spontaneity of an artist’s book and the refinement of a gallery catalogue for a project about guest-host relationships in a foreign country. Jackfruit designed a special pouch, evocative of the artist’s engagement with readymade objects and hand rendered imagery  and produced a screen printed bookmark with hand embroidery. Jackfruit also edited, proofread and coordinated  compilation of the text from the various authors and supervised the printing.

Lokamatha Mandira, Janapada Loka: A renovation project for a folk museum complex in Karnataka.

Jackfruit has renovated the Lokamatha Mandira gallery, one of the three at Janapada Loka, a folk museum on the Bangalore-Mysore highway, with the collaboration of architect Ceejo Cyriac (www.janapadaloka.org). The project involved research and planning, budgeting, regrouping and cataloguing of objects, writing interpretive materials in Kannada and English, design of signage and fresh displays. The focus of the exhibit is on the processes and objects associated with cooking, storing, farming and animal husbandry.

Bombay Jadoo

Bombay Jadoo (Steidl, 2007) is a book of black and white images of Bombay by the American photographer Betsy Karel who was inspired also by Indian contemporary English fiction (www.bombayjadoo.com). Jackfruit designed the publicity material for the book launch in India and all the events associated with its release in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi. The events included panel discussions on urbanism, film and photography with Shyam Benegal, Sabeena Gadihoke, Shilpa Phadke and Ram Rehman, book signings, gallery displays of selected images from the book as well as an experimental performance on Bombay as part of Art of the Matter,  Jackfruit’s ongoing series on art and literature.

Earth Bound: Land Water People

Jackfruit researched, designed and presented Earth Bound Land Water People, an exhibition of black and white photographs in collaboration with German Agro Action (www.welthungerhilfe.de). The show brought to urban audiences in Bangalore, Hyderabad, New Delhi, Kolkata, Jaipur, Bombay and Bhubaneshwar a close view of GAA’s presence in India, its philosophies and accomplishments as an agrarian funding organization working with Indian NGO partners. Jackfruit did surveying and fieldwork at every project in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Rajasthan and used the research to curate the show and assist photographer Clare Arni to develop visual narratives to make a case study of each project.

Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art

Publicity design for a private art foundation for their workshops and grants.

Jackfruit develops graphic materials for art institutions and the various events, programs and publications they produce. Our knowledge and commitment to the arts helps us create innovative materials that allow design to support and augment the discourse on art that exhibitions, scholarly research and other activities promote. 

Jackfruit has designed publicity posters and e-mailers for the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art’s (FICA) writing workshop (2007), Emerging Artists’ Award (2007) and Public Art Grant 2008 (www.ficart.org).

A Walk from Anegundi to Hampi

A Walk from Anegundi to Hampi: A self-guided tour journal with illustrations

The Kishkinda Trust’s tour inspired Jackfruit to create an experimental book which conceives the past through folklore, myth and history (www.thekishkindatrust.org). With words and pictures, the book encourages movement through the landscape. The collage and embossing-based technique used to develop the images suggests the idea that all sites are composed of artifact, narrative and representation. A Walk from Anegundi to Hampi is designed as a souvenir and an illustrated journal and comes with a box of watercolor pencils. Once coloured, the images detach at the perforations for easy framing.