Celebration of life, colours and art

Celebrating various facets of art, Alliance Francaise de Delhi in collaboration with Prithvi Fine Art and Cultural Centre organised a Spring Festival (Visual and Performing Arts). The festival was curated by Arshi Ahmed at Alliance Francaise de
Delhi, New Delhi.

 The four-day festival was organized to welcome the spring season with arts, folk music (Mahesh and Group), poetry, live paintings and screening of art films by eminent artists Gopi Gajwani, Kavita Nayar, Kanchan
Chander, Seema Kohli and Sangeeta Gupta.

“Spring for me is celebration of life, the colours brighten our life. We have our own seasons inside us. Before the outset of summer, I thought it would be appropriate to celebrate the festival of colours, letters, visuals and films, therefore in collaboration with Alliance Francaise, Prithvi Fine Art and Cultural Centre decided to celebrate Spring Festival, said Sangeeta Gupta,” says Arshi Ahmed, curator of the festival.

 The light drizzle makes the opening of the Spring Festival a perfect one which was followed by surprise visit of well-known writer and Urdu poet Javed Akhtar. He visited the gallery and was mesmerised by the paintings on display. On the other hand, several well-known artists participated in a panel discussion on the present scenario of art in the country.

 Artist Keshav Malik said, “We should guard our values as luxury. The biggest poverty is emotional poverty. We shouldn't deprive ourselves of emotional strength. Culture should be imbibed in our integrated personality.”

Alka Raghuvanshi seemed little upset with the way art is being treated. “Artists should be careful about their pricing. In some way they are responsible for steep prices of the art works which has disappointed art connoisseurs and collectors. The gallery should also be thinking of keeping the prices of artworks reasonable so that it reaches more people,” she said.

It was fun-filled artistic extravaganza where various people from different walks of life had congregated to enjoy the spring festival. Among the prominent faces were Pt. Debu Chaudhuri, Mamata Sharma (chairperson, National Commission for Women), Surendra Sharma, Naresh Kapuria, Shovana Narayan,  Rohit Suri, Seerat Narendra and Sanjay Sachdeva amongst others.

Arshi says, “This was a unique experience for me in terms of curating very diverse forms of art and combining it with music, poetry, dance, writing, live paintings and film screenings. That I could, in the course of four days, combine so many different forms of artistic expressions was something unexpected and surprisingly wonderful. I feel one can't treat paintings in isolation of other artistic expressions and experiences, and this forum provided me with an opportunity to coalesce and combine many artistic forms.”