LOOKING BEYOND, STEPPING ÍN

These seven young artists hail from different backgrounds and circumstances, but are united by similar attitude to bypass what has been given to them as artistic prescriptions. These artists in the show paint, draw, weave and sculpt the essence of the very tools that they engage in representing: Aranya Naganur’s natural tree-form refutes a differentiation between the real and the metaphoric. The tree is woven to fit into where an actual one struggles to root itself amidst the concrete. Her quilt is a live yearning to connect with the same roots as well. Santhosh Pattar meticulous drawing of flora, fauna, inscriptions about aristocratic places like Hampi etc draws attention to an anthropology of farming culture. He satirises relations between labour, memory and the roots, through nostalgic and emotional visual queries. Varun Achar, using metal, wood and AI, creatively arrives at a set of tools that combine formal objects, fantasy and fiction, in inseparable ways. He is drawing our critical attention to the the ritual of institutions of looking and museumisation. Manushya’s human figures form a landscape of the nature, of geography, in crystallised forms. The coloured nature-scape evoke ambiguity in what we perceive as one and many. Vinyas Katenahalli addresses the tradition of local wrestling through his terracotta sculptures, converting them into tiny toys, dolls. They bond physically and tangibly. A once huge tradition of wrestling has been now toyed down to tiny forms of nostalgic yearning. Kavana Badrinath’s watercolour and acrylic works depict the impressions and appearances of mundane, domestic objects, insisting that they exist most of the time, in time. They evoke and anchor what they hide in plain sight: memories of absences, repeatedly erased marks, solitariness and a past. V. Vaishali’s art is about the idea of food and cooking, the real and otherwise. Between her multimedia creation, she performatively unveils how cooking ranges between serving the gut and the mind. It becomes a compulsive ritual of domestic healing. Established art historical positions have been ‘looked beyond’ in these works and these artists have ‘stepped into’ their own foot steps, to see if artistic experience is not elsewhere, but here and now.
H.A. Anil Kumar