Astha Butail Selected as the Next BMW Art Journey Winner
By Karen Cheung
ASTHA BUTAIL, Turning Towards Pure White, 2016
“We were struck by its sensitivity and range, and how it expands upon the artist's prior practice of investigating her own history and identity,” the jury said in a joint statement. “The journey brings together ethnography, spirituality, and sociology. We were especially taken by Astha Butail’s interest in tracking down endangered oral traditions, which she will document with the tools of an artist and interactions with scholars and spiritual leaders.”
Born in Amritsar and based in Gurgaon, India, Butail’s art employs the use of geometry as a means of inquiry to understand how different composite elements of an entity relate to its whole. Her themes are memory and time, the idea of the archive and collaborative authorship.
In March, Butail presented her work Turning Towards Pure White (2017) at Art Basel Hong Kong. Butail’s debut solo exhibition was shown at Gallery SKE, Bangalore, and she has participated in group shows at Kolkata’s Experimenter, Kolkata, the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, and the Masquelibros Artists’ Book Fair in Madrid.
Launched in 2015, the BMW Art Journey is a collaboration between Art Basel and BMW that enables winning artists to embark on their own journey of creative discovery. Past winners include sound and performance artist Samson Young, German video artists Henning Fehr and Philipp Rühr, British artist Abigail Reynolds, and Los Angeles artist Max Hooper Schneider.
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