Latest news with #Coalescence
The Hindu
5 days ago
- Business
- The Hindu
Chennai's House of Klothberg hosts Coalescence a contemporary art show in a retail setting
A place for everything, and everything in its place. That is how the world makes sense. But art is meant to, and often does, defy boundaries. That defiance is what gives this art exhibition its quiet power. Rather than hang politely on white walls, the works in Coalescence inhabit a living space — nestled between racks of sustainable, vegan garments, shelves of heels, and displays filled with straw hats and jute bags at The House of Klothberg on Harrington Road. The store and vegan cafe, with its commitment to sustainability and mindful design, is less a backdrop and more a co-curator, allowing the artworks to engage with everyday life. 'Art shows are always within galleries or spaces meant for art. So, the people who walk in are art literate, and they're coming just because they're interested in art. So how do you make art accessible to the public?' asks curator Jitha Karthikeyan. To bring art to spaces that are not galleries, was the idea that fuelled this exhibition. The five participating artists, Aishwaryan K, Sooraja KS, Dimple Shah, Anitha TK, and Mibin, interpret the central theme of coalescence in their unique way. Chennai-based visual artist K S Sooraja's collage of artworks depicting the physical and mental experiences and feelings of women, hang inches away from a display of handbags and shoes. The artworks confront the weight of physical and emotional experience tied to womanhood, using hair as a symbol. Dimple Shah, meanwhile, presents three distinct series. Fungi Head, bursting with psychedelic colour, is a metaphor for her shifting psychological states. In contrast, Contemplating with a Dead Tree turns inward, and focusses on decay, and the passage of time. Her third series, Quixotic Landscape, takes a more overtly critical tone, using absurd, imagined terrains to comment on ecological destruction and misuse of natural resources. 'In the broader context, art is very important to the world because it helps us understand those who are different from us. These artists have no common thread running between them. But that itself is the point. To show that we can be different, and still belong together,' says Jitha. Aishwaryan K's Hasta series captures hand gestures in gouache and archival ink on elephant dung paper. Each gesture, drawn from memory, ritual, or everyday experience, invites the viewer to pause and connect with moments often overlooked. They are drenched in nostalgia of a childhood that no longer exists. There is something disarming about turning a corner in a store and finding a painted gesture waiting for you. Coalescence does not demand attention — it lingers quietly, nudging you to look, reflect, and maybe see the space, and each other, a little differently. Coalescence is on view at The House of Klothberg, Harrington Road, Chennai, till June 13.
Yahoo
21-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Danger of a Too-Open Mind
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. At a moment when just asking questions can feel synonymous with bad-faith arguments or conspiratorial thinking, one of the hardest things to hold on to might be an open mind. As Kieran Setiya wrote this week in The Atlantic on the subject of Julian Barnes's new book, Changing My Mind, 'If a functioning democracy is one in which people share a common pool of information and disagree in moderate, conciliatory ways, there are grounds for pessimism about its prospects.' But what should the civic-minded citizen do with that pessimism? Knowing about our tendency toward rationalization and confirmation bias, alongside the prevalence of misinformation, how do we know when, or whether, to change our minds? First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic's Books section: What Shakespeare got right about PTSD The life of the mind can only get you so far The last great Yiddish novel 'Coalescence,' a poem by Cameron Allan Another article published this week presents a possible test case. The Yale law professor Justin Driver examines a new book, Integrated—and, more broadly, a surge of skepticism over the effects of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision that ordered the racial integration of American public schools. The book's author, Noliwe Rooks, was 'firmly in the traditional pro-Brown camp' as recently as five years ago, Driver writes. But America's failure to accommodate Black children in predominantly white schools, combined with the continuing lack of resources in largely Black schools, led Rooks to conclude in her book that Brown was in fact 'an attack on the pillars of Black life': that integration, as carried out, has failed many Black children, while undermining the old system of strong Black schools. Should this case of intellectual flexibility be celebrated? It certainly makes for a lively debate. Driver calls Rooks's 'disenchantment' with the ruling 'entirely understandable,' but he sticks to his own belief that Brown has done more good than harm, and he makes a case for it. For example, Rooks portrays Washington, D.C.'s prestigious all-Black Dunbar High School as a hub of the community, staffed by proud and dedicated educators. Driver complicates the history of those 'glory days' by quoting its most prominent graduates: 'Much as they valued having talented, caring teachers, these men understood racial segregation intimately, and they detested it.' And he notes that, beyond changing education, 'Brown fomented a broad-gauge racial revolution throughout American public life.' He demonstrates that we can absorb new information—in this case, evidence of the many shortcomings of American school integration—without forgetting the lessons of the past. Barnes makes a similar case in Changing My Mind, a book that is, in fact, mostly about why the novelist hasn't altered his opinions and ultimately doubts that trying to is worth it. To adopt new beliefs, he writes, we would have 'to forget what we believed before, or at least forget with what passion and certainty we believed it.' Setiya chides Barnes for his view that, given our hardwired biases, we might want to give up on being swayed at all. But he concludes that such stubbornness is 'not all bad.' Perhaps keeping an open mind is overrated—at least if it means 'coming to accept the unacceptable,' as Setiya puts it. And how should a person determine what's unacceptable? 'When we fear that our environment will degrade,' Setiya writes, 'we can record our fundamental values and beliefs so as not to forsake them later.' Once we know what our principles are, we can more easily weigh new information against our existing convictions. Without them, it would be easier to change our minds—but impossible to know when we're right. It's Hard to Change Your Mind. A New Book Asks If You Should Even Try. By Kieran Setiya The novelist Julian Barnes doubts that we can ever really overcome our fixed beliefs. He should keep an open mind. Read the full article. , by Whittaker Chambers This 1952 memoir is still thrust in the hands of budding young conservatives, as a means of inculcating them into the movement. Published during an annus mirabilis for conservative treatises, just as the American right was beginning to emerge in its modern incarnation, Witness is draped in apocalyptic rhetoric about the battle for the future of mankind—a style that helped establish the Manichaean mentality of postwar conservatism. But the book is more than an example of an outlook: It tells a series of epic stories. Chambers narrates his time as an underground Communist activist in the '30s, a fascinating tale of subterfuge. An even larger stretch of the book is devoted to one of the great spectacles in modern American politics, the Alger Hiss affair. In 1948, after defecting from his sect, Chambers delivered devastating testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee accusing Hiss, a former State Department official and a paragon of the liberal establishment, of being a Soviet spy. History vindicates Chambers's version of events, and his propulsive storytelling withstands the test of time. — Franklin Foer From our list: Six political memoirs worth reading 📚 Free: My Search for Meaning, by Amanda Knox 📚 Sister Europe, by Nell Zink 📚 Twist, by Colum McCann What Impossibly Wealthy Women Do for Love and Fulfillment By Sophie Gilbert Watching the show, I found myself stuck on one question: Whom is this for? Is there an underserved niche of Santa Barbara moms with their own pristine vegetable gardens who have previously been too intimidated to attempt baking focaccia? And yet, as With Love, Meghan went on, it started to hit a few of the classic pleasure points. A beautiful woman with a wardrobe of stealth-wealth beige separates and floral dresses? Check. A fixation, both nutritional and aesthetic, on how best to feed one's family, down to fruit platters arranged like rainbows and jars of chia seeds and hemp hearts to sneak into pancakes? Check. A strange aside where she details what it meant for her to take her husband's name? Ding ding ding: We're in tradwife territory now. This is absurd, of course. Meghan isn't a tradwife; if anything, she's a girlboss, a savvy, mediagenic entrepreneur with a new podcast dedicated to businesswomen and a nascent retail brand. So why does she seem to be trying so hard to rebrand as one, offering up this wistful performance of femininity and old-fashioned domestic arts that feels staged—and pretty familiar? Read the full article. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Explore all of our newsletters. Article originally published at The Atlantic
