Anusha Yadav

Anusha S. Yadav was born in London in 1975. She graduated in Communication Design from the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad India. Anusha’s interest in photography began while still at design school. Subsequently, she attended University of Brighton to study photography.

After thirteen years of a successful career in graphic design and advertising, Anusha began working as an independent editorial and documentary photographer in 2006. Since then she has photographed several well known personalities and significant events all over the country.

The key strength of Anusha’s work lies in documenting people and events in natural and available light. Her pictures are not merely intended to make people or their environment look beautiful, but rather, to represent their/its presence and participation through the image. Consequently, her work has been described as narrative photography, with the power to trigger ideas and dialogue and being suggestive rather than illustrative. She also continues to design books, as that remains a constant incentive to create stories and drama with typography.

Her photographs have featured in publications like Verve, Mid Day, Times of India and Rolling Stones, among others.She is also represented by Getty Images/India for editorial content.Anusha lives and works in Mumbai, India.

Ritan Chauhan

Bollywood Kitsch revisited by Ritan Chauhan.

Shail Shah

 via we are debris.

Ruchika Madan

Ruchika Madan is a ceramic artist producing decorative and functional pottery and handmade tiles. The images she uses are derived from plant forms as well as ordinary objects, textures, and patterns observed in nature. Inspirations include linoleum and woodcut prints, textile designs, architecture, and traditions in ceramic and decorative art. 

Ayush Rajvanshi

Love the Shadow puppet like illustrations from  Ayush Rajvanshi. More at his blog.

Aakash Nihalani : by Avinash Rajagopal

Street art is alive and kicking in Brooklyn. It writhes and pulses along the walls, singing along brick tenements, screaming across the doors of auto garages and warehouses. The artists are rebels who are supposed to be in hiding, but who operate under famous monikers and nicknames. Street art is invariably a statement about the urban landscape: Who holds power here? Who is allowed to express themselves, and who isn’t? It is a very rare kind of street art that operates just as well within the formal space of the art gallery, and that actually loses very little by this transmutation.

Such is the work of Aakash Nihalani, whose most recent exhibition opened at the East District Art Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. Yes, he operates under his own home grown Indian name: no fancy monikers like PosterBoy or Gaia. And his fluorescent pink and green outlines of isometric boxes are very comfortable on the bare white walls, forcing me to do a little jig as I move back and forth and to and fro, finding new ways of looking at them.

“A gallery allows me to place my work within the history of art”, he says, “It also allows me to show what I can do given a white wall.” It is this sort of informed comment that gives away his formal training in art, and his background before he came into the art world. Aakash began by studying Political Science at New York University, with the aim of becoming a lawyer. Born to Indian parents, growing up in a Jewish neighbourhood in New Jersey, this was the respectable career path to take. But Aakash admits he was always something of a rebel. He first started painting on clothes when he realised, that he not only wanted to make art, but that he wanted people to interact with it. Now all he had to do was to convince his shocked parents that their son wanted to shift to art school!

Aakash’s tryst with street art began with an exhibition he put up while studying Printmaking. He was taping his prints to the wall, and idly began to trace the outlines of a table’s shadow with the tape. The idea excited his teachers, and Aakash had found his medium. His work before this was abstract expressionist: a preoccupation with surfaces and textured backgrounds. He had already hit upon the device of creating a little enclosed space on the canvas for contemplation using an isometric cube: the basic unit of space. All that remained now was to replace the painted background with surfaces in the real world; and the cubes began to serve just as well to highlight the beauty of the mundane, to force passersby to stop and think a little.

To Aakash, this is the raison d’être of his work: watching people engage with it. In the street, people see sidewalks and staircases in a whole new way through his taped outlines. In the gallery, he uses mirrors with his taped boxes to reflect the viewers or their surroundings in intriguing ways.  And he photographs this endlessly. To me, these photographs are the final work of art: freezing the moment where the art and its audience are in conversation. Aakash explains, “It is a visual cue that cannot be fabricated. It is a function of reality.”

He uses a clean medium (the tape comes off the walls pretty easily) and therefore his work is legal: he hasn’t had a run-in with the cops yet. This consciousness is the most telling aspect of his work. It raises a very important question about street art: If it is really all about using public space creatively and about beginning an open dialogue, why are the artists in hiding?

 Aakash Nihalani is now extending his ideas from street art into other domains: the gallery wall and the internet. But the fact remains that in his work, and in the work of others like him (such as the Wall Project group in India), street art has begun to shed the baggage of secrecy and illegality that has dogged its steps from the beginning. And in doing so, it may finally realise its goal of being not just a serious mode of artistic inquiry, but a real and valid form of public self-expression.

For more images of Aakash's work, visit his website and flickr.

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Avinash is an aspiring design critic/teacher, currently pursuing a Masters in Design Criticism at the School of Visual Arts, New York. He studied to be a product designer, and his heart also beats faster for Indian art, textiles, crafts, social responsibility, mythology and history. 

Radha Dumra

Radha Dumra has a degree in Knitwear Design from London College of Fashion. Ironically , she defies the 'easy-to-mass-produce ' nature of knitwear by fashioning one off , complex pieces. She is inspired by changeability and the surreal. Love the lobster!

Ruchita Madhok

I received these hand made post cards last year from Ruchita Madhok , an artist, traveler, scenographer and one of my favorite poets. These postcards were made for MASALA CHAI, as a documentation of the Design Week at London. Do explore the inside of Ruchita's head here - it's quite beautiful.

J So Style

Fringed, shagged, shredded or studded? How do you like your scarves? 

Jasleen and Sonu are the writer/fashionista duo behind the line of accessories and styled scarves that go by the name J So. If you're lacking sartorial inspiration I suggest you visit their blog Fashion Bombay or better yet, buy their wares!