Hanart TZ Gallery is happy to announce the first solo exhibition of Gulammohammed Sheikh in Hong Kong which is also our last exhibition at our temporary space at unit 407 Pedder Building before we move into our permanent home in units 401 on the same floor this September. The exhibition entitled “Gulammohammed Sheikh” will open at Hanart TZ Gallery on Friday, 6th July 2012 and the opening ceremony will be officiated by Mr. P. Ajithakumar, Consul, The Consulate General of India. “Gulammohammed Sheikh’s career as artist, poet, educationist, art historian, and curator has seen him engage with a diversity of artistic and literary traditions from many parts of the world. As a painter of more than five decades he has pioneered an engagement with historical forebears and a social and political investment in art practice. Since the mid-1970s, he has also returned time and again to dwell on human habitations: homes, streets, shrines, bazaars, cities, towns, and villages. His projects present the mapping of the art historical onto the contemporary, teasing out the interstices between tradition and contemporaneity, collapsing place and time into an amalgam that can speak in multiple tongues. The world-view pertinent to his work is manifestly pluralistic, rooted in the welter of contact, exchange and influence that gives rise to culture in various parts of the world.” In Sheikh’s work, audience is invited to walk through his cities and float above their streets, such as his sculpture Weather Vane: Incredible India / Vibrant Gujarat, City of Statues (2011) and Partition (2011). The Alphabet Stories (2004) is an artist version of the traditional portable shrine inspired by Rajasthan itinerant storytellers. Excerpted from Place . Time . Play by Chaitanya Sambrani