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"Together & Apart"
Group of Contemporary ArtistsTwo things can be true at once.
A library grows in a forest in Norway. In the year 2114, wood from a thousand saplings there will be used to make paper to print an anthology of a hundred books that, till then, will remain unseen. The forest’s caretakers are optimistic about their living time capsule––an enduring record that exemplifies a basic faith in our continuity.
Earlier in the year 2021, two hundred scientists from across the world signed their names against a climate report, declaring what the United Nations called “code red for humanity.” The situation is dire, it says, but it is yet unclear who is to blame. The report mentions some variation of the phrase “human activity” or “human influence” over thirty times in its first ten pages. The word “fossil fuel” first appears on page fifty-three.
A warming Earth both strains and confirms our collectivity. We are, on the one hand, individual actors, polluters, custodians, and mourners of private tragedies. But equally, we are also a unified and unlikely humanity, at large and at risk. The impressions of our lives are simultaneously our own and each other’s, and they chart a future of weakening possibilities. The end of the world, we now understand, is partly a game of perception. How, then, to see better, more closely, and with greater intention? At the heart of the eleven works displayed here are some uneasy contradictions, between our individual motives and collective responsibilities, our injured histories and living ecologies, the clutter of language and the contained mass of object, image, colour. Each artist––through rearrangement, juxtaposition, material intervention, and irony––offers us a new perspective on how to think through, and beyond, these contradictions.
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Vivek Vilasini
“... and for those who sing their national anthem in somebody else’s mother tongue (after ‘Death of Socrates’ by Jacques Louis David)”
91 x 162 Inches
Digital Print on Canvas (Triptych)
Limited Edition: 3 (10 + 1 AP)
2021
Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Socrates is reinterpreted in Vivek Vilasini’s digital print, featuring kathakali dancers in place of the Athenian philosopher and his pupils. The epistemological foundations of scientific rationality are rooted in the Socratic method, and Vilasini injects a playful irony into the question of Western scientific pre-eminence, once a tool for colonial control and plunder.
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Baiju Parthan
Terminus
Animated 3D Lenticular Print
36 x 90 Inches
( Diptych 36 x 45 Inches, Each )
2016
Baiju Parthan looks speculatively at both the future and past, staging a virtual event over the historic Italian Gothic-style Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai. Foregrounded in his lenticular print are the last of the city’s iconic Fiat taxi cabs, buoyed by white balloons, out of sight and into the recesses of collective memory.
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G R Iranna
From Ash to Blossom
48 x 126 Inches
Ash, Acrylic on tarpaulin
2021
GR Iranna’s painting tracks a movement, from the ash-on-canvas panel on the left to the energetic cherry blossom on the right, representing the power of the life cycle in engendering new transformations.
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Jagannath Panda
The Shadow of a Blue Moon
60 x 60 InchesAcrylic, Fabric, Glue
2019
Image Credit : Jagannath Panda
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Vibha Galhotra
Life on Mars ( 9 )
Ghungroos (trinkets), fabric, plyboard & wood
72 Inches Diameter
2019
Image Credit : Vibha Galhotra
Vibha Galhotra and Jagannath Panda’s individual works share a planetary focus, employing texture, depth and visual perspective as a means of communicating more nuanced ideas. Galhotra uses a NASA-sourced topographical image of Mars, sewing ghungroo that mimic the pixelated view of the red planet to interrogate dystopian notions of space races and interplanetary living in the age of Anthropocene. Panda’s circular work is interested in visibility and invisibility, using the metaphor of the “blue moon,” which only appears so because of changes in atmospheric composition. The surface of Panda’s earth is composed of folded and torn velvet, interrupted with white dots that resemble city lights seen from the night sky, raising questions about the subtleties and generalisation of our visual interpretations.
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Veer Munshi
Protected Innocence in False Dichotomy II
Fiberglass, resin, wood, sun board, varnish
48 X 36 X 24 Inches
2019
Veer Munshi’s Hangul is at the centre of his negotiation with the animal’s gradual endangerment due to habitat destruction in the Kashmir valley. Serving as a metaphor for urbanisation, political exile, belonging, and unrest, the red deer’s horns turn into tree branches as its feet stay planted in the Valley’s all-white cityscape.
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Riyas Komu
Contemporary Hole.
Terracotta.
19 x 20 x 9 Inches
2019
The terracotta bust by Riyas Komu, on the other hand, articulates a lapse in listening rather than enunciation. The figure he represents is not only deaf but has a hole punched through the side of his head, with a brain that overflows from the confines of his skull. A failure, in other words, of civilizational memory; all mind and no ability to listen
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Khalil Chishtee
Explanation
14 x 9 x 8 Inches
FGR
2014
Khalil Chishtee’s sculptural head, rendered in a deep, burnt red, references another Western figure, Julius Caesar, whose face is impressed with a white handprint covered in Urdu calligraphy conveying platitudes on American exceptionalism. Form deceives content, and the historical power of language, text, propaganda, and scripture seem to diminish with further explanation.
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Abhimanue Govindan
The oneness of being: Mind and the body
72 x 96 Inches ( Diptych)
Acrylic on canvas,
2021.
Two large acrylic-on-canvas works take differing approaches to form as a means of conveying process. Abhimanue VG’s vibrant and modular triptych rejects attempts at cultural decoding in favour of a more universal and sensory reading.
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Ravi Agarwal
Not just another day
Archival Photographic Print
45 x 30 Inches
Edition 1 of 5
(2019)
Image Credit :Ravi Agarwal
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Ravi Agarwal
Rhizome
Archival Photographic Print
48 x 32 Inches
Edition 1 of 5
(2015)
Image Credit :Ravi Agarwal
Finally, two staged photographs by Ravi Aggarwal tackle the stakes of climate change in a direct, yet still exploratory, manner. In one image, two figures in yellow biohazard suits approach a forest lake, where the traces of toxicity would otherwise be invisible to us if not for their protective gear. A danger that is illegible without a subject. For the second image, Aggarwal worked with a fishing community near Pondicherry, creating a set of beach signs based on the words they use to describe their relationship to the water. Distance distorts, and while someone further from this context may choose “beautiful” or “raging,” words including “subsidy” and “money” appear in the image, problematizing distinctions between how the natural world is perceived and conceived.
Both images, in Aggarwal’s own words, revolve around the idea of “what an inclusive nature looks like”–– a theme that more generally runs through each work exhibited here. Together, these works encourage us to reflect on our relationship to our contexts and each other, considering how we negotiate our place within our historical and environmental legacy.
Text by Varun Nayar
Together & Apart:
Past viewing_room
