Feroze Gujral- More than just a glamorous face

Feroze Gujral is at the open air cafe. Everywhere, there are sharply-dressed people networking fiercely as they get their nicotine fix. Gujral weaves through with the practised ease of a habitué – after all, the 1990s super-model, wife of architect Mohit Gujral and daughter in-law of artist Satish Gujral, is one of the pillars of the capital’s glamour set.

Trailing in Gujral’s glamorous wake are artists Shilpa Gupta and Rashid Rana, and curator Natasha Ginwala — they announced at the India Art Fair this January, that the Gujral Foundation supported art project, My East Is Your West, has been accepted as an official collateral event at the Venice Biennale, which begins in May. It’s a historical event, being the first collaborative art exhibition at the world’s oldest and largest international art event by the two South Asian countries, who share history and culture but whose recent relations have been marked by suspicion and misunderstanding. Interestingly, neither India nor Pakistan has a national pavilion at the Biennale. Then, of course, there is the stature of the two artists involved – both Mumbai-based Gupta and Lahore-based Rana have often been called the most important contemporary artists of their generation, their practices blending the traditional skills of painting and sculpture with new media and technology.

It’s a coup — but Gujral makes light of having pulled it off. “This project was seeded in Venice two editions ago. I was standing under a small awning with a gentleman — it was terribly cold and freezing — when somebody passed me by and asked, ‘Where is the Indian pavilion?’, and I said there isn’t one. Two minutes later someone else passed by and asked the gentleman on my right, ‘Where is the Pakistan pavilion?’ So I turned to him and said who are you and he said I am Rashid Rana the artist. We both looked embarrassed that we didn’t have a national presence in Venice. (So we said) just imagine what we would call it if we had a single pavilion together at Venice? That started a conversation, which, over the past four years, has developed into this really good bad idea or really bad good idea.”
To those who know Gujral as the glamorous face peeping out of magazine covers and page three spreads, her avataar as patron of contemporary art will come as a surprise. But over the last half-decade or so Gujral has emerged as one of the leading philanthropists supporting young artists with radical, experimental practices which have yet to find favour with buyers and collectors.

In 2011, she set up the India chapter of Outset, the UK-based art fund/charity that raises money to support new art by, among other things, buying works and donating them to public museums like the Tate or installing them in public spaces. 

In a country where most wealthy individuals who give to art do so because they collect art, Gujral does her bit with fundraising and giving out spaces that she owns. 24, Jor Bagh, a picturesque, abandoned house that she owns has been used for art projects by the likes of RAQS Media Collective and Sonia Khurana. Aspinwall House in Kochi, a large, sea-facing heritage property owned by real-estate company DLF, where her husband is currently vice-chairman, was one of the main venues of the Kochi Muziris Biennale. Thanks to the DLF connection, she facilitated Vishal K. Dar’s light installation, Prajapati, at the pit dug up for the under-construction Mall of India in Gurgaon.

Gujral, refreshingly, refuses to make much of her efforts. “It’s not a big thing,” she demurs. “When Bose (Krishnamachari) and Riyas (Komu, the directors of the Kochi biennale) called me and said we have this idea, you have this property in Kochi, would you like to give it, we were delighted, let’s do it, we said. There’s no big thought. The house in Jor Bagh is actually a house I am supposed to build for myself. But I’ve been lazy. My children were away studying, but one is coming back now and one in a year- and-a-half, so we will build that house.”
“Why is it that an Indian artist who was charging Rs.10 lakh 10 years ago is now charging Rs.20 lakh, whereas a Chinese artist who was charging Rs.10 lakh earlier, is charging Rs.10 million now? Where can you change the conversation, where can you get the world to look at India?”

The world will definitely be looking at Indian art – and that of Pakistan’s – in Venice, come May. Of that much Gujral can be sure, and can claim to take credit for.