NIV Art Center | Neb Sarai

By Sakhshi Mahajan

When a private art institution can pursue its commercial and creative goals simultaneously, the art world should give them a pat on their back! No doubt a program like that would require a huge financial corpus to back them, but its sustainability stems from the brains, hard work and passion that go in to making it work. Founded in 2009, NIV Art Centre is a beautiful space in Neb Sarai {close to I.G.N.O.U- Indira Gandhi National Open University}, and is flanked by a myriad of architectural spaces including some old forts. It offers different facilities to aspiring artists including scholarships and studio spaces, gallery space for exhibitions, media theater for digital display, an amphitheater and installation arena, and residencies for international artists.

‘NIV’ means platform/ base in Hindi and it is doing a phenomenal job providing a creative platform and opportunities to aspiring artists. By providing scholarships and studios to young artists, NIV gives them a platform to finish their formal training in art and display their works in the shows that the gallery undertakes from time to time. It also invites international artists, giving them an opportunity to explore their artistic practice in another environment, experiment with new forms and mediums and meet new people from a different culture. These Art residencies put emphasis on multi-layered cultural exchange, which in turn influences an artists’ practice immensely! NIV thrives on the creativity of its in-house artists, but it also hosts a range of group shows for artists from all over the World. Its aim is to build a dialogue between the artists and the audience in order to “open up a possibility for an interdisciplinary interaction and an inquisitive understanding of the works of art with its deeper aesthetics.” It also focuses on and encourages new media and plastic arts.

It is imperative that young artists are nurtured and provided with opportunities in order to create a structure and flow in the art market. NIV is playing an important role by providing an avenue for young artists to creatively experiment in order to produce cutting edge contemporary art.

Coming up at NIV Art Center |

Its next showIts next show titled ‘Junk to Inbox: Art with Beauty and Social Concern’ will be on from the 1^st to the 15^th of June 2012 at 210 Neb Sarai. Artists were expected to use industrial scrap and waste in their works of art. In an artistic sense this could be described as “found art” a method that artists employ, which indicates the use of an object that hasn’t been designed for an artistic purpose, but which exists for another purpose already. “Found objects” include manufactured items, things which occurring in nature or objects of utility.

For more information on NIV, click here.