InKo Centre’s virtual gallery connects audience

Chennai

Speaking to DT Next, Rathi Jafer, director of the Indo-Korean Cultural and Information Centre, says, “It is envisaged as an online platform for representation, refraction and reflection of creative ideas and expressions by artists from India and Korea. With the pandemic and the closing of physical spaces, we have explored how we can open virtual doors to simulate and experience artistic expression with a technological intervention that enables easy navigation to provide an immersive, holistic, meaningful experience. Geography becomes history in a sense and we can work with Indian and Korean artists located anywhere in the world.”

Talking about the upcoming virtual exhibition A Porous Membrane that will be launched on January 29, she shares, “For this virtual exhibition, we have an Indian, Korean and American curatorial, artistic and technical team based in the USA working seamlessly with us to present an exhibition that examines, through artistic installations, the theme of the body as a subject. Where we would normally have had to transport and install work, hire a gallery and incur related presentation and communication costs, we can instead explore the boundless nature of the gallery and invest in technical requirements to effectively present the exhibition. The navigation across three ‘rooms’ is easy, almost intuitive; one can examine the artwork up close and easily find all the relevant information about the artwork as well as the curatorial note; videos with interviews with artists as well as a 3-D mapped version of an exhibition which took place physically in the US. We hope that the experience will be as close as possible to physically walk into a gallery to view the artwork.”

Rathi opines that virtual exhibitions will complement how we view exhibitions in physical spaces. “Our aim is for technology to act as a bridge to enable, excite, stimulate and provide room for introspection and interrogation. We hope in the post-pandemic context to present a physical model - where the virtual and the physical coalesce to provide both reach and depth in terms of connecting and engaging meaningfully with artists and audiences in India and Korea, in particular, and the world at large,” the director sums up.