Pinaki Ranjan Mohanty
Pinaki is a Bhubaneswar, Odisha-based sculptor. He takes his hometown, Chilika Lake as a conceptual site to respond ecologically, culturally and historically through his artistic practice. As a sculptor, Pinaki is deeply influenced by the current materiality, literature and socio-political conditions of Chilika. The artist questions the politics of aesthetics as well as that of neo-liberal interventions to his land and its forgotten memories. Although he takes the water bodies of Chilika as the conceptual ground for his oeuvre, his larger intention is to trigger questions around global water bodies, poetic and literary references around lakes, their relationships, representations and the consequences of man-made events in post-capitalist times. Pinaki materialises his thoughts through sculptures, interactive installations and site specific works, where the spectator can be a part of his experiences. He approaches art from an extremely personal perspective which makes his oeuvre utterly and irresistibly powerful. That strength then, grows into a much larger universal landscape of concern as it demands new avenues to understand water bodies and current causality. The installation exhibited in this show draws imaginary lines of migration of the birds, of human life even, who fly adrift on clouds made of seashells from the shores of their/his home. The symbolism is apparent, poignant and irresistible - a sense of missing your home, of the feeling of home no matter where you are headed to. The dynamics of movement, of flight, of the journey and the destination is in that sense from his home counterpoised with the permanence of home.
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Ruchika Wason Singh
Ruchika’s artistic practice is predominantly centred around the ideas of mark- making in the history of painting and different forms of representations from the South-Asian perspectives. Ruchika’s practice revolves around ideas of unknown spaces, forms of continuums , as she works with various traces and intentional scratches to generate a layered sense of dialogue between history, present and possible imagined futures. Very interestingly the works open visual experiences to materialise different dimensions to co- associate, relate and generate multiple meanings.
As Ruchika states, “I work with layers and forms. After a certain point of time my interest is to look at the forms, and how they divide the spaces very differently. The biggest challenge is where to stop and from where to take the forms further to generate a psychological space. A sense of un- recognisability as a form of imagination has been an integral part of my process and how through the forms of this un-recognisability there are space of relativity that can be accessed at different levels through my body of works”. The works from the exhibition is a great combination to incorporate mark-making as a conscious choice and different forms of monumentality through which a space of enhance visibility can be generated. The works, in that way, reflect a unique sensibility of thickness and transparency, both materially and metaphorically.
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