New on the Website: August
Hi!
As promised, here are the poems, artist features, comics and photo essays we published in August in The Alipore Post Journal, a space for art, poetry, photography and comics.
ART
Artist Showcase: Soumyaraj Vishwakarma
Soumya lives in Gujarat, India. She is a Fine Arts graduate from MS University Baroda. Currently pursuing her career in visual design. She loves to travel, meet new people and document her experiences in her little sketchbook. Her creations are inspirations from landscapes, music and culture.
Check out more gorgeous illustrations by Soumyaraj here.
Bangalore-based self-taught painter Ranji David has painted over 500 paintings since the pandemic began, painting every single day. He continued to paint even when his family and he were infected with COVID. Before the pandemic, he had painted for seven years, made 46 paintings and sold only one. Over the last year, he has sold 28 works to eight people from eight different countries.
See Ranji’s work and know more about his artistic journey here.
Lake City by Bianca Tschaikner
We're in awe of Austrian artist Bianca Tschaikner’s Lake City, a three-meters-long leporello drawing created during a two months long stay in the city of Udaipur in Rajasthan, India. Udaipur, also called Lake City and known as the “Venice of the East”, is considered one of the most beautiful cities of India. It is a fairytale city full of gorgeous palaces, a labyrinth of lakes and bridges and millions of intricate alleyways leading to mysterious temples.
Read all about her process of making the illustrated book here.
“As an illustrator, having an inquiring mind and a vivid imagination is what keeps me moving. My inspiration comes from here, there and everywhere. For example, my recent pieces are inspired by sarees from Raw Mango. Or a few tint-less old photographs of women from the 1800s, posing in traditional wear and laden with jewellery.”
-Rishika Kapoor
See Rishika’s full Sari series here.Artist Showcase: Collages by Vasundhara Prakash
“Time has been a running theme, in the middle of all this. There seems to be a strange relationship with it. It feels more visceral than ever before and at the same time blurred, with days merging into each other. But most of all, a sense of the time that we all are losing, of living our lives.
During this period, I started making digital collages, each one everyday for about fifteen days almost like going through the stages of grief- the sense, mood and the state of mind somewhere started to shift. What started with denial, and an awareness of the fragility of reality is beginning to steer towards surrender, a sort of acceptance of the uncertainty. It’s been difficult to let go of control but that’s something I have just started to sit with and not be so afraid of.”
-Vasundhara Prakash
Check out more collages by Vasundhara here.
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POETRY
Excerpts from the wonderfully diverse poems we published in August:
Illustrated haiku on Love, Intimacy and Erotica
This Haiku x Art collaboration on Love, Intimacy and Erotica was borne out of a call for submissions from the Instagram handle Happy Ingredients. Sudeepti Tucker and Ravneet Bawa share a unique friendship based on the spirit of curiosity and the soul of recklessness. Together, they pushed the boundaries of their comfort levels with their respective art forms through this project, chuckling late into the night about if it was too risqué or not enough? This project is a manifestation of their charged conversations in what they hope is a first of many.
Check out all the illustrated haiku as part of this collaboration here.
Lost Atlas by Sunil Bhandari (from City Poems)
I am tired
of not loving you,
tired of my detox regime,
of continuously redrafting
our lost atlas of belonging.
I am tired
of clinging to a city
redolent with wet intimations
of things half-done
or fully-left.
I am tired
of finding you
in places
watermarked with
our senses.
I am tired
of knowing certainties
of what we could have been,
& the uncertainties
of what I am.
I am tired
of seeing myself
as a caricature,
playing dumb charade
with life ~Read more City Poems by Sunil here.
Things I am No Longer Walking Briskly Past by Anupriya Dhonchak
Habitual ambiguity, casual disinterest/intellectual dispassion-
Indeterminacy and contingency of texts, of punctuations, spaces/safe spaces.
I endow, construct, denude and deny meanings
Sleep over them, weep over them
clinging to a blanket of unfamiliar wrinkles in the tenses-
Returning to poetry, thinking of why I left,
Twisting the doorknob with muscle memory
Homecoming is a verb, and I have allowed myself to feel it.Read the full poem here.
June flicked a matchstick
against a crosspatch,
the fire roared over our fields.
The stubble has been burning since.
We plunge knee deep
into water cannons
transplant paddy into PDS shops,
grow basmati more fragrant than Pakistan's,
less free than a democracy.Read the full poem here.
Pseudo-love by Irtika Kazi
A month after you decided
I was not enough docile
For your insinuations
I was a doggerel in your hand. How
mellow is the heart of a woman waiting
for Love to take charge—
all of it made sense, signs
of a passade.
You passing the chalice to parched lips
And me in sheer silks
Macabre.
All of it rolls down my cheek
As if it never was.
“darling, you're priceless”
was your jingle,
All you but ever thought I was
A twofer.When mothers die by Gauri Juneja
It’s one of those cosmic wrongs
A mother dying
Being an agent of God and all
The kind of wrong that
Cleaves mountains down the middle
Splits the sky wide
Sends tides crashing against rocks
But when it happens
Amid hushed hallways
In an island of disinfected whites
Where nature hasn’t
the permission to rage
Read the full poem here.My Oldest Lover by Kriti Das
Today I love myself
A little more vehemently
With a little less inhibition.
Without looking left and right.
I’m right in the middle.
I strip in broad daylight now.
The curtains are drawn to let the light in
It's only happenstance that lets your sight in.Read the full poem here.
Lessons for the Damsel by Geetanjali Dhalia
I was raised to be selfless and loving
But my first learning wasn’t without an ‘I’ in the alphabet
I wonder how over the years,
The world changed so much,
That my first lessons have suddenly reversed.Read the full poem here.
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COLLABORATIONS
The Alipore Post has curated a postcard set with 10 poems and illustrations that evoke hope in these difficult times for the Rebuilding Post-Covid India fundraiser on Milaap in collaboration with Compassion Contagion, Pravah and Atypical Advantage for Rebuilding Post-Covid India. Join us in helping vulnerable communities in India fight the impact of Covid-19. Featuring some of the finest poets and artists from the country, we hope this postcard set will help people heal and bring some joy in these dark times.
Read all the 10 poems with the curated artworks here. To order the postcard set, donate Rs 1500 to the fundraiser and we’ll send it over to you!
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PHOTOGRAPHY
My Altruistic Half by Manu Dubey
“My sister and I, with contrasting personalities and antipodal ideologies, are both old-school. The story revolves around the same feeling. It shows our shared moments of leisure in routine life and reflects the co-existence of our similarities and differences. My Altruistic Half is a personal narrative of our casual living- uncensored and unsophisticated, where my sister tends to me in so many little ways and even bears with my leg on her while sleeping.
Personally, I absolutely love moments that are only shared between girls. There's something very special about it. In a group of girlfriends or among sisters, this is very common and we hardly notice the essence of it. But when we do, it's so liberating and I am too grateful to have witnessed and be a part of it.”
-Manu DubeySee the full series by Manu here.
She Sways With Gentle Giants: Farheen Fatima x Mohammad Hussain
In this makeshift world of hers,
she sways with gentle giants.
In this makeshift world of hers,
giants shroud her with droplets of bliss and bless.
In this makeshift world of hers,
she flows amongst streams that fructify emotions.
Check out the full collaboration between Farheen Fatima x Mohammad Hussain here.
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COMICS
“This process offers me the chance to be the most truthful as the hourlies are largely unedited. It also makes me notice what I notice and deem to be important enough to record and communicate. For my creative practice, I’ve trained myself to keenly observe life, waiting for the moments in existence that capture an atmosphere or feeling or light silliness. This could be something a person, animal, object or space does. In the time and format constraints of these hourlies there is much that is left out and it’s interesting what I chose to keep in as memories marking my day. It also makes me wonder if I live differently while going through this process, because it either happens that I do little, in order to draw, or do lots and the unrecorded hours pile up."
-Laurel Pettitt
Check out the full Hourlies comic here.
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