coming soon
Lalitha Lajmi at Anne Barrault
29 April – 14 June 2025
Galerie Anne Barrault is delighted to present Lalitha Lajmi’s (1932-2023) first solo exhibition in France. Born in Kolkata, India, her works are collected by the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bombay, the British Museum and the CSMVS Museum.
In 2023, a retrospective of her work was held at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bombay.
Curator in Residence at Beaux-Arts de Paris 2023-2024
In 1989, Gloria Anzaldúa wrote a formally inventive text that oscillates between poetry, personal narrative, and historical and political commentary. The essay is a toolbox. Anzaldúa encourages an active subjectivity and invites us to draw on our personal stories and fiction to shape our collective narratives.
Driven by this spirit, autohistorias brings together a group of artists who—from the 15th to the 21st century—have used the self as a way of narrating history, shaping political allegory, and using narrative as a means of emancipation.
Autohistorias presents a group of auto-fabulists, chimeras, beautiful liars, chingadas, and bad girls who traverse complexity with literary flair, aesthetic clarity, and performative memory. Fiction, autobiography, and speculation become the tools for composing a narrative and a collective memory; An individuality guided not by absolutes but by ambiguities. The exhibition brings together works by student artists and the heritage collections of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, as well as those of guest artists. Presented are self-portraits, hybrid collages, invented languages, and parallel worlds—made up of personal stories and intimate archives. Autohistorias creates a shared space and time born of intersubjectivity, enunciation, and listening.
ALGO-PORTRAIT Works by Tara Kelton
Curated by Skye Arundhati Thomas Jan 9 — Feb 26
Thirty minutes into the Netflix documentary The Great Hack (2019), Brittany Kaiser—whistleblower and one-time founding member of Cambridge Analytica—reclines in an infinity pool at an undisclosed seaside location. She is ‘somewhere in Thailand’ the film tells us as jagged, ghostly islands layer up the horizon. A butler in white uniform carries over a tender coconut with a striped blue straw sloping at its side. Kaiser splashes in the pool in her oversized sunglasses, ‘Just me here,’ she says to the camera, ‘the person trying to overthrow two administrations and all of the most powerful companies in the world.’ Cambridge Analytica, founded in 2013, was a contractor firm once hired by nation states to conduct military PSYOP (psychological warfare) and advise on election campaigns. In 2018 documents about the firm’s malpractice were leaked, leading to the Cambridge Analytica trials, which transformed our understanding of big data. Kaiser and others testified that CA had been collecting and spying on our daily data trails (Google searches, Facebook activity, Instagram posts) and using these to determine personality types. These personality types were then used to target voters with election-specific advertising (read: propaganda). They had commanded influence over both Brexit and Trump’s election. It wasn’t just an American or British phenomenon however, CA had worked on campaigns in India, too. Data was suddenly a political agent. Bad data, thus, forms the premise for Tara Kelton’s Algo-portrait, which shape-shifts the idea of data and portraiture in a series of digital, painting and drawing works. In the 21st century, self-portraiture is an elaborate daily exercise, where we produce and perform ourselves online. With the ubiquity of intelligent algorithms, this self-production is being tracked, manipulated and mined by our data leakages. These data spillages, algorithmic traces and accidental selfies hacked by AI are the ‘algo-portraits’. Where the selfie performs, the algo-portrait doesn’t lie.
