Art & Culture

Conversations in the Nude

Mihir Srivastava

Open’s staff writer Mihir Srivastava likes to sketch nude portraits of regular people—men and women, strangers and friends, thin and fat. Some are disgusted when he asks them if they would pose for him. But, surprisingly, many agree. Why?

The Cult of C-Grade Movies

Shaikh Ayaz

This is cinema that can make a masochist wince. So how come it is acquiring fans who know—or ought to know—good cinema from bad?

In Search of Modern Art

Shaikh Ayaz

From Raza to Husain to the leader of the Bombay Progressives, FN Souza, nobody really knew what modern art or modernity was. It was Paris and its influences that gave their amorphous ideas a sense of form and identity

When Talking Is High Art

Rahul Bhattacharya

British-German artist Tino Sehgal’s work ‘creates’ conversations between strangers in urban societies. Someone should tell him about Kolkata’s famous addas

An Osian of Debt

Sahar Zaman

Neville Tuli on the difficulty of raising Rs 10 lakh in cash while Osian’s had Rs 1,000 crore in assets, and the bad press that he gets

Internet Diva

Shruti Ravindran

Namitha, the siren from Surat who reduces south Indian men to slavering wrecks

Alphabetical Disorder

Janice Pariat

An exhibition built around words, their trickery and playfulness, their horrifying power to harm and maim, and their magical ability to conjure imaginative worlds