NEXA Music to Present Season 2 Super Winners Music Video

3rd May 2023, Mumbai: The winners of the highly anticipated NEXA Music Season 2 competition have been announced by NEXA, India's leading automobile brand. The top four contestants will curate a music video. NEXA Music Season 2 is a one-of-a-kind platform dedicated to discovering and promoting original English music talent in India. With over 2,400 entries from across the country, the competition garnered an enormous reaction from budding musicians. The top four winners were picked through a rigorous evaluation procedure based on their uniqueness, ingenuity, and musical talent.

Swati Bhat

Maestro A.R. Rahman judged the winners of NEXA Music Season 2. This season's Supper winners were Hanu Dixit, Sunep A Jamir, Inga, and Gaia Meera. The music videos will be posted on the official YouTube page of NEXA Music and promoted on other social media channels. NEXA Music Season 2 has reinforced NEXA's dedication to promoting creative music talent in India. The competition has given young musicians a platform to display their ability and interact with music fans around the country.

Gaia Meera, is a Mumbai-based musician whose soft voice and poignant words have captivated audiences. Hanu Dixit, a multi-talented artist from Mumbai, sings, writes, and composes music that is both popular and meaningful. Sunep A Jamir from Nagaland uses his distinct voice and lively personality to create music that is both entertaining and moving. Inga, from Bangalore, mixes eastern and western musical influences in her work, resulting in a familiar yet refreshing sound.

Communiqué, on the success of NEXA Music Season 2, Juhi Mehta, COO of Qyuki Digital's, "We were testing water while doing the first season, and the success we achieved with Season 1 was overwhelming. We knew that we had to present much better, with responses and scale that will be touched on in season 2, and we are thrilled. We are glad season 2 received more love and recognition, which brought out the truly deserving and emerging artists from the country.”

About NEXA Launched in 2015, NEXA is designed to offer a global car buying experience to customers. Every NEXA experience is a testimony to unmatched hospitality, innovative technology and a global lifestyle. With over 407 showrooms across 250+ cities, NEXA is the 3rd largest retail automobile brand (in terms of volume). NEXA persistently stays true to its philosophy of ‘creating the new to inspire the next by providing a premium experience to everyone who enters the world of NEXA. NEXA introduced three experiential pillars which catered to the expectations of the discerning customers; NEXA MUSIC (Creation of New English Music that is Original and Inspiring), NEXA LIFESTYLE (Creation of new lifestyle experiences that are Avant-Garde and Aspirational & NEXA JOURNEYS (Creation of exclusive Journeys that are Unique). NEXA product line-up includes a complete range of premium best-sellers – IGNIS, BALENO, CIAZ, S-CROSS and XL6. Every vehicle in NEXA is curated with the best of technology, design, and features for customers’ delight. About QYUKI Co-Founded by Samir Bangara, A.R.Rahman, and Shekhar Kapur, Qyuki is a data-driven new media company which discovers & amp; invests in India’s most influential creators to help them rapidly grow their audience, create content and launch new IPs. Qyuki has to its name several premium formats like ARRived - a singing talent hunt show with A. R Rahman as a mentor, Jammin’ - a collaboration-focused music show where legendary Bollywood composers and India’s top Internet icons create original tracks - and NEXA Music - a nationwide talent hunt for English-language singers. In Jan 2020, Qyuki created a breakthrough format of a fan festival called Epic Fam Jam, which brought together India’s biggest online sensations - in thematic mini-worlds of their own for superfan meetups - topped with incredible live performances. Qyuki also exclusively manages a host of talent across various digital platforms including YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat.

#thecommunique #tc #tcn #entertainment #NEXAMusic #music #realityshow #ARRehman #art #artist

Metaverse Fashion Opera is an innovative project

Metaverse Fashion Opera is an innovative project that explores the connections between the Metaverse, fashion, and music.

Swati Bhat

Image: #CAPITAL official

The idea for Metaverse Fashion Opera came from a phone call between Gemma, Alastair, and Roy. Alastair will soon write and compose the story for the first metaverse fashion opera, #CAPITAL.

Dragon City, China's first metaverse platform, will collaborate with Fashion Opera to create a new work — and a new stage in the development of this nascent genre.

A group of artists and designers will work together on a piece that excavates the Metaverse's history, telling its story from the dawn of human experience to its realisation in MVFW 23.

This is a tale of dematerialization and symbolism: from the first time someone exchanged a token for an object, or a symbol — a word — for a being in the world — all the way through gold bars and bank notes, or the virtual reality of novels and epic poetry — to bitcoin, avatars and Dragon City itself.

Featuring the designs of Chenpeng, a brand that sees no boundary between beauty and ugliness, the possible and the impossible, and the work of which has been characterized by Anders Sølvsten Thomsen (ANTIDOTE magazine) as both “anti-tradition and deviant,” as well as virtuosic dancers, performers, and sopranos.

This is the story of becoming something else — where everything is always possible.

The concept of Metaverse Fashion Opera comes from a brainstorm in a call between Gemma, Alastair, and Roy. And soon, the story behind the first metaverse fashion opera, #CAPITAL, is created and composed by Alastair.

What is Fashion Opera?

Fashion Opera is a discipline created by Alastair White and Gemma A. Williams under the banner of their company UU Studios. Over the past four years, five works were produced that explored synergies between fashion and music: WEAR, ROBE, WOAD, RUNE, and Hareflight. These featured contemporary dance, immersive theatre, experimental music, and a range of collections: from a specially-made capsule by London-based brand KA WA KEY to a re-presentation of archive work by Issey Miyake.Fashion Opera has been described as “a whole exciting new genre of art” (BBC Radio 3), “a groundbreaking new genre” (Classical Music Magazine), and “a perfect combination of show and costume” (Vogue Italia). The operas have been shortlisted for a number of Scottish art awards, and recently received New Zealand’s Tait Memorial Trust prize. Three have gone on to be recorded and released as albums on the Métier label to further critical acclaim.The methodology behind these, proposed by Alastair White in a recent PhD as well as numerous academic articles and lectures, concerns a reimagining of the relationship between garment and music. This is based on ideas drawn from contemporary mathematics and quantum mechanics: that is, the existence of multiple infinities and universes allows for the existence of an artform in which each constituent — fashion, music, drama, dance — is both central and absolute. The individual works often explore themes of groundbreaking technology and or recent cosmological discovery: including virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and the multiverse.

#THECOMMUNIQUE #TCN #TC #FASHION #METATAINMENT #ENTERTAINMENT #ART #OPERA #CAPITAL #FASHIONOPERA #METAVERSE #FUTURE

'First installation artist' of India, Vivan Sundaram, passed away at the age of 79.

Multidisciplinary practitioner organised artist and student group protests during Indira Gandhi's Emergency government of 1975–1977 after being inspired by the 1968 Paris demonstrations.

Pritish Bagdi

Vivan Sundaram, a prominent modern artist from India, passed away at the age of 79, according to his Mumbai gallery. He died early today in a hospital in New Delhi as a result of complications from a brain bleed. His wife, the well-known art historian Geeta Kapur, is the only survivor.

Sundaram was born in 1943 in the then-British India's northern city of Shimla, Himachal Pradesh. He was the son of Amrita Sher-Gil, one of India's most well-known 20th-century artists, and Indira Sher-Gil, an Indian government servant who served as the country's first law secretary after independence. He received his education at the Doon School before going on to study at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (MSU) in the 1960s under the direction of renowned educator KG Subramanyan. He also attended the Slade School of Art at London University, where one of his professors, RB Kitaj, had an impact on his early works by incorporating kitsch and Pop Art elements.

Over six decades, Sundaram produced a wide-ranging and aesthetically varied body of work that includes painting, sculpture, photography, digital art and room-spanning installations—according to his gallery, Chemould Prescott Road, Sundaram was the first installation artist in India. Should his works be bound by a style or theme, they find in common a deep and sustained concern with activist and social issues within both India and the wider world. Early works of his, such as the painting May 68 (1968), held in the Tate collection, reference the civil unrest that broke out in Paris during the protests of May 1968—an incident that greatly influenced the young Sundaram and provoked him to set up a commune in London where he lived till 1970. On his return to India in 1971, he worked with artists’ and students’ groups to organise events and protests, especially during the years of Indira Gandhi's Emergency.

His later life, largely spent in Delhi and Mumbai, saw him enjoy a successful career embedded in the Indian art community, helping to promote the country's art scene on the global stage and galvanise it around social issues. In 2003, one year after the 2002 Gujarat riots that saw communal violence tear across India, Sundaram took part in a group show at the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust in New Delhi—of which he was a founding trustee. Here he showed two sculptures, Mausoleum (1993) and Gun Carriage (1995), which depicted a Mumbai riot victim.

Both these works were part of his room-sized installation Memorial (1993–2014), created in response to violent conflict between Hindu and Muslim groups in Bombay (now Mumbai) in the early 1990s. Comprised of a number of individually titled smaller parts, the work forms a commemorative tomb for an unknown victim of the civil conflict around the razing of Babri mosque in Ayodhya in 1992 by Hindu extremists.

One of Sundaram's best-known works is Re-take of ‘Amrita’ (2001-2005), in which photos of his family taken by his grandfather Umrao Singh Sher-Gil between 1904 to 1940s are remixed and collaged through Photoshop, to create tableaux that skew space, time, and, therefore, reality. Prominently featuring his aunt Amrita, the work was described by Sundaram at the time as a “photo-dream-love-play".

Sundaram was one of 30 artists to show a new work at the ongoing 15th edition of the Sharjah Biennial (until 11 June), where his photomontage installation Six Stations of a Life Pursued (2022) is on display. "Okwui's [Enwezor's] proposition suggests a narrative that is dynamic yet recursive in an ethically accountable way," Sundaram said of the project. "I present a photography-based project, Six Stations of a Life Pursued (2022), a choreography of bodies that have undergone violence, experienced incarceration, and lived through mourning. The sixth ‘station’ signifies a journey premised on the historical and rehearsed with activist resolve."

Sundaram is represented by Chemould Prescott Road in Mumbai and Photoink and Vadehra Art Gallery, both in Delhi. Shireen Gandhy, the director of Chemould Prescott Road, tells The Art Newspaper: "To say Vivan took risks is an understatement. Often one considers artists who paved the way as it were, giving courage to others to walk that path. Vivan was that when it comes to installation art—it was a new term, fairly unknown to the contemporary world." "Vivan's Marxist ideology, his sense of justice and his strong politics intersected into his art practice. I will never forget his engine oil drawings from 1991-92, after the Gulf War. It was possibly the first time when he broke out of mediums like charcoal, pastels or oils. These were large works on paper made with engine oil—the bottom of each work with trays of oil that felt like bloodspill (and less like an oil spill). The exhibition held at two public spaces—the Shridharani in Delhi and the Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay (presented by Chemould)—was a revelation to many. My strongest memory was the presence of students during the course of not only the exhibition, but also the installation of the show. I think it was a moment of reckoning both for us as gallerists and for the audience for works to be perceived in this courageous way." Sundaram’s work has been included in many solo and group exhibitions and international biennials, including two retrospectives at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Kiran Nadar Museum in New Delhi. His work has been shown at Tate Modern, The Queens Museum of Art, New York, and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan. The artist published more than 18 books, including Making Strange, Trash, Amrita Sher Gil: An Indian Artist Family of the 20th Century, Re-take of Amrita and Vivan Sundaram is not a Photographer.

Vivan Sundaram- born in Shimla on 28 May 1943, married in 1985 with Geeta Kapur, died in New Delhi on 29 March 2023.

#thecommunique #tc #tcn #art #VivanSundaram