Wearing His Art On His Sleeve

He provides a sardonic take on the intricacies of the social dynamics within India’s art community through his digital project #ArtWorldMemes, but his fashion choices are no joke. Abhinit Khanna, in a tête-à-tête with Shubham Ladha, talks about what has shaped his sense of style

- Shubham Ladha

With the advent and proliferation of social media, the world of visual and fine arts is at a crossroads. Various questions about the role, curation and experience of art lead to its constant redefinition. Closer to home, Mumbai-based creative arts manager and consultant Abhinit Khanna is building a bridge between the spheres of art and technology one audacious meme at a time.

The 30-year-old Rochester institute of Technology graduate has worked as a production assistant with some of the country’s biggest names and galleries in art and design — including Jitish Kallat and Rajeev Sethi (he worked with the latter on Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji international airport’s public art displays) — and has been privy to the field’s good, bad and ugly.

The term meme was originally coined in 1976 by biologist Richard Dawkins to describe how an idea spreads from person-to-person in a culture by random means of imitation. However, over time, the internet has appropriated it for any form of conceptual media (usually humorous in nature) consisting of culturally relevant visuals and text which get repeatedly passed on over the platform.

After stumbling upon them on another Instagram page, Khanna began to use vintage pictures of Bollywood stars from the ’80s and ’90s — now almost comical thanks to their dated outfits and melodramatic expressions — adding cheeky captions that take wry digs at the art ‘scene.’ and as memes are wont to do, these spread quickly among his digital network via his Facebook and Instagram (@abhinit_khanna) profiles.