One Globe 2012: Uniting Knowledge Communities (http://www.salwanmedia.com/one-globe-2012.html) The conference produced by BrainGain Magazine’s editorial and conference team connects leaders from business, government, think tanks, private equity, industry associations, policy makers, entrepreneurs, and academia from around the world. The aim is to discuss and learn about one of the most pressing challenges in the 21st century, that of creating a truly knowledge based economy across South Asia.
Habiart Foundation is privileged to be the Art & Culture Partners for One Globe 2012, a unique initiative for Uniting Knowledge Communities.

Education, Aristotle said, is the best provision for old age. Learning though, isn’t the sole domain of youth. Acquisition of knowledge, which may acquire a sheer veneer of wisdom over the years, isn’t a clearly delineated process. Often it needs, a rolling up of sleeves, some messy smudging of outlines and boundaries, and at other times, a fresh start altogether. Not unlike art.

For young people still beginning the journey that will join them to their future selves, the path can appear daunting, more an endless spiral staircase than a bridge to betterment. For some, the challenge lies in identifying their own centre and finding points of intersection with the world beyond.

Habiart Foundation presents this short series of artworks as benign beacons in the quest for knowledge, a buttress for the bridge that Aristotle propounded. The intention is not only to illuminate perspectives that are other than ours but hope to recall viewpoints, inspirations, ambitions that we cherished collectively under the blurred miasma of youth, but have perhaps abandoned in a progressive narrowing of choices. The faces and figures on display here share an agenda with the knowledge communities that are being reshaped inside.

Laxman Aelay’s moment of captured coyness is also an epiphany on how communication can close gaps. If Diptish Ghosh projects a moment of triumph, he also elucidates how vulnerable we are in our moment of accomplishment. Limbs akimbo we are flailing, partially lifted into a blue sky, but inexorably falling into a shadowed red. Mousumi Biswas creates a desert dreamland, which contains as much aspiration and hope as in a little boy’s unquenchable smile.

A heart breaking work like Ghulam Rasul'sThe Child offers more than mere commentary on the exclusions of education. The bright pointillist brushstrokes of the child shrouded in an electric blue are buoyant and exuberant. Yet against a sere beige backdrop, his face and his form speak of a different shade of blue altogether, and tell a story of desolation. In a controverting of colour codes, Swaroop Basak uses mellow earth tones and bleak grays to move us into exuberance. The flexible figures spanning the globe are freed from weighted bounds, physically liberated, as if life can be lived without constraint. While Saptarshi Naskar drives home what is precisely the point of our endeavours; that final rewarding smile, even on a young face that is already lined with cares beyond her years.

These wonderfully varied works together amplify our understanding, possibly deepen the conversation of how knowledge sown and harvested here can be scattered beyond. Seen together, these paintings centre our own purpose and remind us that at the heart of education lie children, each with a uniquely constrained situation, yet unfettered by hope.

Curated by Biba Saxton
For Habiart Foundation