Artists & Aesthetes Salon Series: With Yamini Nayar and curator Pujan Gandhi

Join us for Monsoon Culture Club's first salon featuring a converstaion between artist Yamini Nayar and curator Pujan Gandhi.  Yamini and Pujan will dig into Nayar's practice in which large-scale photographs of built assemblages made from easily accessible materials - paperboard, pigment, wire, string, photographic elements -  unearth  ideas which emerge intuitively, often springing from the subconscious. These assemblages specofically built for the camera gives permanence to their continuously shifting gestalt, and serve as the photographic “eye”.
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Yamini Nayar (b. 1975) received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, 2005, and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, 1999. Currently, she is an analyst-in-training at the CG Jung Institute, NY. 
Most recently her work was included in Phaidon’s Vitamin C+: Collage in Contemporary Art and reviews have appeared in major publications such as Artforum, The New York Times, Art India, Asian Art Newspaper, Vogue India, Art in America, The New Yorker and Whitewall Magazine. Over the years, Nayar’s work has been exhibited widely. Major survey shows include: Ray Photo Triennale, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Constructs/Constructions, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (both 2015); Sculpture is Everything, Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane (2012); Manual for Treason, Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2011); The Empire Strikes Back, Saatchi Museum, London (2010); and Fatal Love, Queens Museum of Art, (2005). Nayar has also shown with Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai (since 2012); Wendi Norris, San Francisco (2019) and BosePacia (2006). Public collections include the Art Institute of Chicago, Guggenheim Museum, Queensland Art Gallery, Kiran Nadar Museum, deCordova Museum and Cincinnati Art Museum.

Pujan Gandhi is an Independent Curator who bridges historic and contemporary art with a transnational perspective.  From 2018-2024, he oversaw the South, Southeast Asian, Himalayan, and Islamic Art Collections at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. There, he mounted the first reinstallation of its galleries in over twenty years, made significant acquisitions in the realm of Mughal and Pahari Paintings, Himalayan Art, and Indonesian textiles whilst realizing installations by Dayanita Singh, Zarina Hashmi, and Monir Farmanfarmaian. Having organized a host of international exhibitions, he's published on a range of topics: Isabella Stewart Gardner's travel albums in India, strategies of 21st century museum display, and edited the multi-
author monograph Anish Kapoor: Reverie & Rupture. Previously, he served as a visiting curator in the African Art Department at the High Museum, Atlanta; worked as an art advisor; and guest lectured at SOAS, University of London--where he earned his Post-Graduate Diploma and MA in the History of Art and Archaeology while cataloging at the British Museum. He was raised in Atlanta, Georgia and is a graduate of Middlebury College.