Shalini Passi is the founder of The Shalini Passi Art Foundation & MASH. She is a Delhi-based art collector, artist, and philanthropist, who sits on the Advisory Board of Khoj Studios since 2012, and serves as a longstanding Patron of FICA (Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art) and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Her collection includes some of the most coveted names in contemporary art, including Bharti Kher, Anita Dube, Sheba Chhachhi, Zarina Hashmi, and Atul Dodiya, alongside significant international artists such as Jeff Koons and Damian Hirst and Indian modernist masters, such as M.F. Husain, Manjit Bawa, and Ram Kumar. Shalini’s passion for art and design is evident in her vast collection of furniture, tapestries, and rare antiques, which are juxtaposed with cutting edge contemporary design, including important pieces by Ron Arad, Vladimir Kagan, and Herve Van Der Straeten. Located within Shalini’s Delhi home, which has been featured in prominent publications such as Wallpaper, Architectural Digest, and Larry’s List, the collection evokes and celebrates a powerful individual narrative that speaks of Shalini’s connection with each piece, each history, and each artist. As a patron and collector, Shalini actively supports emerging artists, and fosters arts education through the Foundation’s year-round programming.
She is regularly invited to speak prominent art and design events, and most recently gave a talk at India Art Fair 2019 and moderated a panel discussion at India Design ID 2019.2020 has taught me to be grateful, empathetic, kind, to listen, to love more, to live in the moment and above all to cherish the people that I have in my life. It has reinforced my beliefs in team work and has helped me understand the strength of togetherness. Absence of physical spaces has opened the portal of digital communication and has broadened the outreach. Today, we have found ourselves resorting to virtual platforms as our hope, our future to connect and communicate. 2021 is only a few sunrises away, and we await here in hope of a new beginning and light. I look forward to more productivity, positivity, cooperations, good health, reinvent, reuse and recycle. In the coming year I wish to continue with more collaborations, achieving my goals, and empowering the bandwidth of art and culture.
Anita Dube’s installation “The Theatre of Sade’’ is a very provocative and powerful work. It was conceptualised and executed in 1998-99. This Installation is one of my favourite pieces from the collection. The work comprises different readymade objects such as dentures or books covered in black velvet. It depicts the loss and rebirth of the individual and society as a whole, and the common experiences in human life, including: morality, desire, pain, and joy. The work talks about emotional cruelty in an extremely sophisticated way. One of the objects in the installation is a small yet most powerful ‘Hand of sage’ that controls everything. According to the artist, putting black velvet on the locally found objects transforms the identity of them and erases the objects’ intellectuality and brings out their sensibility, thus encouraging the audience to approach these strange yet familiar objects with an uncommon perspective.
