ROOM FOR DREAMS becomes a living manifesto for utopian optimism, creative courage, and the power of imagination through a multilayered approach where large scale installations, cinematic storytelling, live conversations, and ritual-driven encounters converge.
"We're constantly striving to strike a balance between work that respects academic rules of composition, established visual codes and good readability, with something more spontaneous, adventurous, playful, even naive."
Hong Kong's particular and seductive Metabolist city planning is an ode to consumption as a great totalizer of culture, and to contemporary art as merely a niche commodity form among many others.
"These works are an exploration of the human body's elasticity and capacity to metamorphose. Informed by my own experience of pregnancy and the birth of my first child last year, these paintings are a meditation on physiological transformation and the body's underlying animalistic and mammalian nature."
Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.
Situated in the southern tip of Mumbai, the neighbourhoods of Colaba and Fort are home to dock yards, grand colonial architecture and most of the city's museums and contemporary art galleries. But as Mumbai's art scene grows, it is also expanding beyond its historic art district into the fashionable western suburb of Bandra and high-rise financial districts like Lower Parel and Worli.