Artists and the general audience at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2012 will hear Mathangi Maya Arulpragasam, M.I.A as she is popularly known, perform for the first time in India Dec 11 at the event’s inauguration.

A British artist-musician of Tamil descent, M.I.A’s name is the acronym for “Missing in Action” (in a conflict). She named herself in memory of a cousin who died in Sri Lanka during the ethnic violence in that island nation.

For her music, M.I.A has been nominated for an Academy Award, two Grammy Awards and the Mercury Prize. Her albums, Arular and Kala, were received to critical acclaim.

M.I.A has a degree in fine arts from London’s Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design. For the Kochi biennale she has made a series of 10 brightly coloured lenticular print collages, eight feet long, framed with hand-crafted mirror mosaics to capture the funky spirit of a rapidly changing India.

Her work reflects the diversity of cultures she has been exposed to: her Sri Lankan Tamil origin, Indian connections, British upbringing and political keenness make her especially suited to rally for oppressed people in Palestine, Africa and Sri Lanka.

The 37-year-old artist recalled that the first 11 years of her life were lived under the shadow of ethnic strife. Her father had joined the Tamil separatist movement in Sri Lanka, and the family was forced into hiding.

She recalled living in poverty on the streets and watching “Sri Lankan soldiers firing inside school rooms”.

Her prints at the Kochi biennale are arranged with custom-made holograms and silkscreen designs. The works are built of layers of saturated digital colour and reflective light-catching surfaces, supporting three-dimensional images of parrots, jungle foliage and gemstones superimposed with photographs of crowds, children and cars.

Explaining M.I.A’s art, Shwetal Ashvin Patel, executive officer of the Kochi biennale, told IANS:

“The mix of ancient and traditional icons with ultra-modern digital surfaces was a representation of Maya’s experience of a new India”.

For her works at the biennale, M.I.A “commissioned wholesale print factories from cities across India to produce multiples of her designs”, a spokesperson for the artist told IANS.

The large-format three-dimensional lenticular images have been made in Mumbai by a commercial advertising company. Her holographic prints have been made in a Chennai factory that produces tamper-proof security stickers for use on credit cards and banknotes worldwide.

The silkscreen printings were made by a local poster business owner in Kochi and the mirror frames are crafted by hand by her uncle, who flew to Kochi to help her work with the craftspeople of Kerala.

Maya uses strencils, spray paints and glimpses of conflicts to make violent images of repression and war, and transposes similar images to the covers of her albums.
The Kochi-Muziris Biennale, featuring 88 artists from 35 countries in the old Jewish spice posts of Fort Kochi, Mattancherry, Kochi City and Muziris, will end March 13.

Source: Matoob News

M.I.A. talks about Matangi, the Hindu deity which she wore the name without the knowing until her unexpected discovery on Google. With so many similarities between herself and the goddess, it will be the name of her fourth album to be released in March.

M.I.A. performed during the World Premiere of the smart forjeremy Showcar by Jeremy Scott at Jim Henson Studios on November 27, 2012 in Hollywood, California. Read the interview – M.I.A : Inside Jeremy Scott’s Spectacular Smart Car Launch

M.I.A. during her research trip with Kochi-Muziris Biennale, she visited Muziris Heritage Project excavation sites, surveyed Biennale exhibition spaces in Fort Kochi and Mattancherry.

Other related videos:
M.I.A. at Kochi
Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam MIA artist in Kochi biennale

M.I.A. will perform at a concert as well as showcase her artwork at international art show Kochi−Muziris Biennale in this Kerala city next month.

“I want to take art out of galleries and make it accessible to the people, specially children,” said Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam, who uses the name M.I.A (Missing In Action).

The three−month Kochi Biennale will see 88 artists from around 35 countries, including 40 from India, exhibiting artworks created with mediums such as films, paintings, sculptures, new media and performance art.
M.I.A, who was nominated for a Grammy Award, will perform on the inaugural day of the show Dec 12. It will be her first stage show in India.
“Getting nominated for Grammy was fulfilment of the American Dream. The Indian Dream is to bring into focus the concerns for ecology and environment as well as inclusive development,” M.I.A told reporters here Wednesday.
“Like music, I would like to bridge the gap between the east and west through art forms,” said M.I.A., whom Time magazine named as one of “the world’s 100 most influential people”.

Source: Indo Asian News

M.I.A. was the big winner at the U.K. Music Video Awards (MVAs) on Thursday (08Nov12) after scooping three trophies.

The hip-hop star, real name Mathangi Arulpragasam, picked up the video of the year, best pop video and best styling honours for her controversial Bad Girls promo, which features machine gun-toting Arab fighters.

Filmmaker Romain Gavras, who helmed the clip, was named best director at the ceremony in London.

Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die was voted best international pop video, while The Shoes’ Time To Dance won the best U.K. dance video.

French electronic music stars Justice landed best art direction and design in a video for Newlands, pop star Will Young took the choreography prize for Losing Myself, and best cinematography went to Feist’s The Bad in Each Other.

The U.K. Music Video Awards editorial director David Knight says, “The winners at the MVAs this year show that the medium is as vibrant as ever as an art form, a promotional tool for music, and as pure entertainment.”

Source: OK Magazine

M.I.A. recently tweeted, “THE HEART OF ART IS MAKE IT THE ART OF ART IS SHARE IT,” but it meant more to her than an all-caps shout-out to the generous high tenet of DIY. During an artist’s lecture yesterday at Museum of Modern Art’s Queens outpost at P.S.1, she made clear that in addition to global bass, staccato double-dutch lyrics, and wartime stencil paintings, one of her favorite tools is the art of dissemination. More specifically, mastering the Internet as art project. It’s a medium that’s influenced her more than most fans know, even including /\/\/\Y/\’s YouTube-streamer clusterfuck of a cover image and the information-freedom exegesis Vicki Leakx. “We built a community,” she said of her fans and other web-detected peoples, “that sort of felt like it was the future.”

M.I.A.’s talk, a lucid, off-the-cuff, plenty funny monologue that lasted a good hour and a half even in the pre-winter chill, was a history of her own artwork pegged to her new book, M.I.A. (Rizzoli), in which she detailed the thinking and process behind her visual art through the years. But it was also a narrative and visual history of the Internet, with Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam as reflective a surface as she’s always been, emphasizing the importance of MySpace, her problem with Facebook (it looks boring) and disdain for the sameyness of current website design — and eventually finding Internet spirituality via her forthcoming album, Matangi.

The talk started with a computer desktop. Held within PS1′s planetarium-like “Performance Dome,” M.I.A. blasted out the contents of three separate laptops on a giant projector screen, each of which contained elements from the making of her last three albums, explaining how the process of making her music started from images, screenshots, and Photoshop experiments she cobbled together over the years. Before she even considered making music, she said, her work at London’s prestigious Central St. Martins included “pre-Internet” looped footage of herself dancing in her friend Steven’s garage, crafting a style of .gif before .gifs were all that easy to craft. Just as /\/\/\Y/\’s .gifs (by Mexican artist Jaime Martinez) predicted Tumblr aesthetic, she was making proto-viral videos before YouTube invented them, somehow precogging the web to come. She also stenciled Tamil tiger-emblazoned lighters igniting sticks of dynamite, got excited over spraypaint cans she found in oddly shaded greens. But after revisiting Sri Lanka for a documentary and transforming that to a successful art show — and a stint on a “deserted island” where she, the sole teetotaller, helped her friends come off heroin — she withdrew from art and began discovering music as her politics crystallized.

“I started getting frustrated,” she said, slouching a bit in her butter yellow shearling winter coat. “Because I had a lot to say, but I didn’t have the platform.”

Read the the rest of the article here

Related links:
M.I.A. Explore Inspiration Behind Next LP ‘Matangi’

M.I.A. is doing it wrong. For years critics and marketing execs have been telling her that if she were to choose a single medium — art, music, politics, whatever — she’d be more successful. But that’s success on their terms, not hers. And above all else, M.I.A. has made a name for herself over the past seven years by not caring about their terms. This is a woman who is deep-down, ground-in, almost genetically punk rock. She’s perhaps the most fiercely political performer active today, and that creates friction when the mainstream comes courting. The mainstream wants the music, not the message; the pretty wallpaper, not the hard questions; the style, not the substance. And even if M.I.A.’s substance is, at times, thoroughly inscrutable, there’s no questioning she presents herself the way she wants to, not the way she’s been told she needs to. She’s not safe. You don’t know what she’ll do next. Unlike many of her celebrity contemporaries, she refuses to fade into the background, and she’s been rewarded for her temerity. M.I.A. is the only artist ever to be nominated for an Academy Award, Grammy Award, Brit Award, Mercury Prize and the Alternative Turner Prize. More importantly, she’s raised awareness of the strife caused by the civil war in Sri Lanka — the conflict that displaced her family and precipitated her move to the U.K. as a child refugee.

She describes herself as an intuitive artist who doesn’t belabor her work by self-editing. Loveridge agrees.

“Maya works in single sessions of activity. There’s no coming back tomorrow to rethink it, or add final touches. Either it works or it doesn’t. If you need three weeks to gently craft and build something, then it’s not right for M.I.A.,” he says. “I think it’s symptomatic of the environment she grew up in as a child. She works as if the computer or the camera might not be there tomorrow. There’s a real sense of urgency to get the idea out there before the opportunity is snatched away from her.”

On a macro level, M.I.A. is a wonderful pop star for the modern age. She’s versed in the means and ways of hardcore rap, rave and punk rock, quoting from a variety of influences (like sampling the Clash on her biggest hit, Kala’s “Paper Planes”). And M.I.A. brings an attitude to her music and artwork that totally redefines worldbeat. Her version comes without any of that pandering Sting funk — the post-colonial sense of pity that’s come to characterize that very tired genre. Hers arrives on the heels of tribal yelps and gunshots — provocative enough by themselves, but when combined with her politics, her work is explosive.

Read the entire article over at Papermag.com

This year the renowned MOBO Awards give their support to the AMAs to present the Best Urban Act in association with MOBO, with Metz & Trix, Raxstar, Arjun, Roach Killa and Mumzy Stranger all battling it out for the coveted Award.

Results:

Best Club DJ: Panjabi Hit Squad

Unsigned Newcomer: Amanjot Sangha

Best Alternative Act: Raghu Dixit

Best Radio Show: Kiss 100 (DJ Neev)

Best Selling Download: Rahat Fateh Ali Khan for Teri Meri

Best International Album: Honey Singh for International Villager

Best International Act: Rahat Fateh Ali Khan

Best Producer: Dr Zeus

Best Album: JK with Gabru Panjab Dha

Best Desi Act: RDB

Best Video: M.I.A with Bad Girls

Source: Chakdey.com