An installation, displayed in New Museum Triennale, called “Songs of Sabotage”, New York, Curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari and Alex Gartenfeld with Francesca Altamura, Curatorial Assistant. 13th February to 27th May 2018.
Site: New Museum, New York.
“Songs for Sabotage,” the fourth New Museum Triennial, questions how individuals and collectives around the world might effectively address the connection of images and culture to the forces that structure our society.
Variable
Xerox and archival prints, painted banners, posters and festoon on handwoven and rough cotton cloth, painted canvas, watercolour painting on paper pasted on cloth, charcoal drawing on paper pasted on cloth, ledger cutting text on fiberglass, Chinese ink drawing on uncut handmade paper, graphite drawings, pinback badges, reflective tape, poster stickers, printed text and a diary full of drawings by watercolour, ink, pen, sticker, gouache, cotton cloth, match box and fiberglass.
The space, I strive in is an irreal entity of contrast and diversity; a world within, paralyzed and blurred by the very notion of it. A space where the idea of diversity incorporates a multi-layered foliage. While the idea of 'unity' has been moulded to become a canon that ricochet. The 'irreal surfaces' is the steadfast account of the inequitable space around me. Ironically, the idea of unity itself vanquishes the spatial limits and resonates 'the excess of resistances on the face of 'excess of oppression'. Excess is something that comes from the understanding of the representational impossibility of the subject, a subject which is a synthesis of form and flux. This work consists of identifying different works from the politically turbulent period of last 10 years placed alongside with a set of recent works, thereby an attempt to locate the contemporary presence of those same historical discourses. With the contradiction and consequences of such relevant developments, I have attempted to create an irreal landscape. Whereas there is yet another landscape, as I mentioned earlier, which defies spatial limits which is a landscape of resistance; one of collective consciousness, a consistent element that breathes life both in tribal land grab movements in Bastar and Odisha on one hand, and native American land movement (against Dakota pipeline) on the other. Such is the narrative of my ideas which aren't ends in themselves, but only a morbid beginning for a new and at the same time an ever-present outlook.
Gary Carrion-Murayari (Kraus Family Curator at the New Museum), Alex Gartenfeld Srinivas (founding Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami), Francesca Altamura (Curatorial Assistant), Aditya Mopidevi (Writer and Curator), Kamal Mitra (Scholar), Avik Devdas (Artist) and Vadehra Art Gallery, Delhi.
all, @anupam_art