Solo Show; Vadehra Art Gallery
6th July to 5th August 2022
Watercolour, Ink, Handmade paper, Charcoal, Graphite, Gouache, Monoprint, Mixed media, Video, Etching, Acrylic, Oil Canvas, Inkjet print, Reflective tape, Terracotta, Stone chips, Cement, Iron, Wood
Dimensions variable
“Reality, is what it is. This suffering truth advertised in all men’s loveliest histories.” - Amiri Baraka
The social is an autopoiesis. An organisation of a machinic Leviathan that gaits in a peculiar rhythm.
In this coursing, bodies are ordered as territory to create new axioms of production. They serve as cogs in the machine, cogs that desire and yet perform the recursive clockwork. As this ceaseless movement empties desire into new patternings of capital, some cogs, with time, grow weary of this flow and its abstraction. With the cleft deepening between thought and action as the automaton claws at the breaking, tearing body, they take lines of flight to decode value systems of capital and engender a reterritorialised unity. This staggers the sovereign. Relegated background in society’s perennial march to ‘development,’ these broken cogs, us, become the excess. They become the potential that inaugurates new temporalities of co-existence beyond the disquiets of power. This conviction that the excess (outcasts) annihilates the surplus is realised through my decades-old life as a communist, campaigner, and propagator of truth.
This assemblage deliberates an impossible inventory from “an infinity of traces” of our histories and of our times. Figures, foliage, and textures animate the surface; they invite us outside our amnesia and ask to commit this time to memory. They illuminate the traces, run through our phantoms, and invoke absences of unclaimed nights. Forms are arranged, written, and layered with kinesis that rejects containment. They are premised on collective witnessing, a with-nessing where insurgent possibilities of shared thinking and doing take radical proportions.
These works are restless to “bombard the headquarters” of the social body. Together they express an absurd terrain of precarity, the “representational impossibility” where all language slips. Contradictions surface as words fail and images decompose. We see then, a labyrinth of broken signs, guarded by the narrow door of the alphabet that refuses to let anything pass. These tensions and antinomies imbue the search for a counter-praxis — accumulating an archive of affects.
https://www.vadehraart.com/exhibitions/177/overview/
https://www.vadehraart.com/exhibitions/177-anupam-roy-broken-cogs-in-the-machine-d-53-defence-colony-new-delhi/virtual_exhibition/
https://thewire.in/the-arts/reimagining-brokenness-through-the-lens-of-possibilities
Tanmay Das, Shambhavi Gairola, Sudip Chakraborty, Srijan Biswas and Vadehra Art Gallery.
Banipur Art Society and Institute of Culture; Navarun Publications; Birbhum Jibon, Jibika O Prakriti Bachao Mahasabha; Aatika Singh, Aman Negi, Shailesh B R, Tahsin Akhtar, Annalisa Mansukhani, Shambhavi Gairola, Vidya Shivadas, Labani Jangi, Girish Chandra Pathak, Pradeep Kumar, Harish Prakash, Radheshyam, Pratap Singh, Lalit Pant, Badam, Mahender Kumar