Emami Art organized India’s first solo AI exhibition EXO-Stential – AI Musings On The Posthuman of AI Art featuring works by pioneering artist Harshit Agrawal and curated by Myna Mukherjee. The project has been manifested by Engendered, a transnational arts and human rights organization, and is in collaboration with 64/1.

The inauguration of the exhibition was graced by Rituparna Sengupta, Ranjan K Ghosh, Karthik Kalyanaraman.

Is AI (Artificial Intelligence) art any good? Is it truly the future of Contemporary art? Does AI re-conceive the human imagination or ready us for its end? Is AI a competition or collaborator? Does AI blur the definition of the ‘artist’? EXO-stential – AI Musings on the Posthuman, offers a deep dive and contemplation of this emergent ontology.

Harshit Agrawal is a pioneer in the developing genre of AI Art.  He has worked with AI art since its inception in 2015. His work has been nominated twice for the top tech art prize, the ‘Lumen’, and he was the only Indian artist at the first global group exhibition of AI Art at a contemporary gallery in 2018.

In this, his first solo show, the practice and diversity of AI art with experiments in media (painting, sculpture, text, video, interactive media), aesthetic approach (conceptual, sociological, the painterly), process (varying degrees of human involvement), datasets (from European to Indian) and themes have been showcased.

An important aspect of the show will be the human experience of both losses of control over creative production when working with AI and the consequent liberation. Today when the rise of AI is one of the most pressing long-term social issues humans face, contemplation of these works, co-created by both the human and the machine, is one way to evade dystopian or utopian fantasies.

The exhibition will be from September 11^th to September 30^th, 2021 from 11 am to 6 pm. You can visit www.emamiart.com for more details.

Priyanka Dutta