Solo show; Project 88
14th March to 4th May 2019
Banners, Posters, Festoons, Pigment, Wood, Distemper, Red-oxide, Cotton fabric, Gouache, Rice paper, Ink, Fiberglass, Water colour, Glass, Oil painting, Canvas, Vintage frame
Dimensions variable
Land is a text—a reality abstracted from a distance—whose reading produces a scape. To land-scape, therefore, is to comprehend with the eye. It continuously appropriates a proportion of the land within the perimeter of the optics. Here, the body serves as an agent through which the landscape configures itself from the real to the representational. As a noun, it not only bears natural landforms but also acts as a medium of interface, a site for social constructions, and a process for forming identity. As landscape becomes a cultural representation of land, where the scapes serve as environmental media that the State ought to govern, it begins to signify power.
Contention in land is invoked for its ability as a resource and is defined by the conduit of the law. My inquiry is premised on the belief that every subject is built upon contradictions that multiply and form social discourse. My attempt is thus to identify such contradictions in all their fuzzy, contingent opacity to dismantle hegemonic discourse. In my practice, I juxtapose different materials specific to the subject—even those that are considered anti-referential or illegitimate witnesses. Through these engagements in diverse locations and contexts, I have encountered the impossibility of representation in certain localised struggles and conflicts, with land itself becoming a reference to events.
De-notified Land is an anecdote composed of three years of observation and identification of the contradictions attached to the land discourse. I unfold this discourse by recomposing different contradictions and consequences against the land-scape of denotification. As the fundamental relations are based on the systematic and maximum exploitation and appropriation of public resources by a privileged few, every entry into the question of resources becomes a matter of political, cultural, and economic contest and contention.
Banipur Art Society Institute of Culture, Sneha Raghavan (Senior Researcher and Projects Lead for Asia Art Archive in India, based in New Delhi, who wrote wall text for the show), Santhosh S (historian and cultural theorist), Sandip K Luis (Art historian), Project 88 Team members- Sree Banerjee Goswami (Director Project 88), Zakia Basrai, Sabiha Dohadwala, Rasik Kerkar, Anant Khuje, Nitesh Shinde, Manoj Mali, Harshal Kamble