Mandalay Hall is a two-hundred-year-old building, which now operates as a luxury hotel with a focus on art. The five suite rooms or ‘Galleries’ of the Mandalay Hall Concept Hotel host immersive installations created by different artists who are invited by a chosen curator. This year the Vol.2 of the residency is curated by the internationally acclaimed artist Bose Krishnamachari and features talented young Malayalee artists such as Anju Acharya and Dibin Thilakan. In the unique, one-month residency both the artists stayed in one of the hotel’s luxury rooms, each of which served as an immersive three-dimensional canvas that they transformed with their creative vision.
Anju Acharya created an artwork on the theme ‘My body and the Birth of my Child’ for the hotel gallery. It represents the journey of motherhood through the series of images portraying the nine months of experience; the journey which is the becoming. On the other hand, Dibin Thilakan curated ‘Ode to Home’ a series of works in different mediums where home plays the center subject. Her work is an attempt to praise these walls with hopes for the future. This provides a unique opportunity for lovers of art to live inside the installation and in that sense be a part of it.
The installations in the rooms are site-specific and temporal, lasting only for two years, after which a new set of artists and designers take-over the space. The Mandalay Hall Art Residency Vol. 1 hosted a stellar line-up of emerging and established national and international talent that included Giuseppe Stampone, Jigesh Kumar, Kartik Sood, Katyayini Gargi and Mithra Kamalam.
Mandalay welcomes patrons to experience this rich art-filled space to host their own unique events. And, the lovers of art can book a Gallery at the Mandalay Hall Concept Hotel to live inside an installation and experience art in a completely unusual and unprecedented way.
