Artist Vikram Divecha in conversation with Louvre Abu Dhabi Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art Robert Kilroy discusses the artist’s video installation exploring concepts of time, space, modernity and globalisation and how these themes relate to the fast pace of development of the UAE at a time when the UAE is hosting the World Expo. Train to Rouen synthesised a number of strands in order to effect one simple change: a five minute delay on the train travelling from Paris to Rouen on October 4th, 2017.
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The Making Of: Vikram Divecha’s Train to Rouen
19 April, 2022
Online
Duration: 45min
Vikram Divecha
Beirut-born, Mumbai-bred, Vikram Divecha is an artist based in Dubai. His practice raises questions about time, value and authorship by engaging people across urban and social spheres, and working with available material and space. Divecha terms this approach as ‘found processes’, which often sees him intervene within public and social systems. From wholesale exporters to municipal gardeners, architectural consultants to railway traffic managers, Divecha’s participants inform and shape his projects in various ways, at times for sustained durations. These attempts translate into public art, site-specific interventions, workshops, installations, moving images, paintings, surfaces, drawings, photographs, performances and text.
Divecha holds an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University and was a participant of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study program. Exhibitions include: Jameel Arts Center, Dubai; The Jewish Museum, NY; Wallach Art Gallery, NY; 57th Venice Biennale; 13th Sharjah Biennial; Louvre Abu Dhabi; Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai; Alserkal Avenue, Dubai; Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw. Grants, commissions and scholarships: Sharjah Art Foundation; the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture; institut français; the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation. Residencies: Land Art Mongolia; Temporary Art Platform, Lebanon..
Moderator: Robert Kilroy – Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art at Louvre Abu Dhabi
Robert Kilroy is Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art at Louvre Abu Dhabi. Prior to joining the Scientific, Curatorial & Collections Management Department (SCCM), he was a faculty member at Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi where he continues to lecture on the MA program in History of Art and Museum Studies. A specialist in Modern and Contemporary art, Aesthetics and Visual Studies, he holds a Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin on the work of Marcel Duchamp and a Masters on word/image relations in late 19th and early 20th century French art. His current research focuses specifically on developing new methodological and conceptual approaches to the question of global art history. He has published widely on the triangulation of modern art, aesthetics and visual studies and the evolving role of the digital in contemporary art and culture. His most recent book, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: One Hundred Years Later was published by Palrave MacMillon in 2017.
