Can drawings be dialogues about provisionality, uncertainty, and change? Can drawings be explored as collaborative reflections on politics, history, identity, and culture? What is the purpose and relevance of drawing in contemporary times? In what ways can we think of drawings as something beyond, materials, materiality, skills, and techniques?
The course encourages students to engage with multi possibilities of drawings -as a thinking and visualization tool; as a visual tool to record factual details; as a process of blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality; and as a work of art meant to be viewed and admired by an audience. Through a practice-led approach, the course takes the students through various analog and digital processes that involve the creation of a set of drawings, transforming the drawings into GIFs, creating free-standing cut-outs, using the cut-outs for shadow projections, and digital animations. Students will also be exposed to printmaking techniques, including drypoint, Lino, and Woodcut, and will learn to experiment with text and sounds.
The core emphasis of the course is to 'free' the drawings from their background and allow them to make an intervention in space, time, memory, and history.
Classes will typically include experimentation with drawings of bodies in motion, representation of the human figure using lines, thinking of bodies in terms of positive and negative space, and the transformation of the image into a character. The assignments are aimed at encouraging students to think of the theatrical possibilities of drawing, assuming their role as that of a theatre director, planning the various stages of the composition and its interplay with light, sound, and text.
anni.kumari@ashoka.edu.in