Shri Rajeev Sethi

The Inaugural keynote during WADe Asia 2017 was delivered by Padma Bhushan awardee, renowned artist and art curator, Shri Rajeev Sethi, one of South Asia’s leading designer, a man who is often credited to bringing the art scene in the Hospitality Industry in India, credited to curate the ‘Jaye He’ Art Walk at Mumbai T2 Airport, amongst numerous other projects, someone who has devoted years to revive, restore contemporaries traditional Indian Arts, Crafts, even performance arts. He is the founder of Rajeev Sethi Scenographers as well as Asian Heritage Foundation in New Delhi.

 

SURFACES REPORTER as official media partner of WADe Asia, presents some of the important points raised by Shri Sethi in his address to the august gathering of eminent architects, designers, artists from India & South East Asia; thoughts that we feel should be heard by all, especially young designers and artists.

The Art Scene at The Leela Ambience - Transformation

As a welcome surprise, WADe Asia was being held at ‘The Leela Ambience, Gurgaon’, whose art scene was co-incidentally curated by Rajeev Sethi, naturally refreshing memories and nostalgia. He tell us how it all started with a poem that set the journey of the Art work at Leela.

“I was reflecting on Gurgaon and its changes as I called the whole program as ‘India Gurgaoned’ and the title for the artwork was ‘Imago’ – that transitional moment, that little state in which things transforms and really it is transforming very rapidly. In the poem I called, Gurgaon as “Jaggery Village,” he says.

Transformation embodied the spirit of the Hotel and the area and the poem helped him decide upon the ultimate program. “The art commission for The Leela Gurgaon revolves around the notion of imagined identities. The glitzy, glass exterior stimulating best in modernity. The bursting and the bustling call centers with American accented inhabitance, living to clocks elsewhere, the consumerism of Mega malls...” he added.

The Nation is facing a creative crisis

“We are facing a creative crisis, just look forward a generation or two and there is nothing we can call our own. We are doomed if we do not address the dearth of investment in art and imaginative capacity.”