Harsha Durugadda

Harsha Durugadda’s artistic practice is primarily cantered around how one can touch and sculpturally experience sound, vibration, rhythms as well as different meanings of separations. As an artist, Harsha has been interested in developing a sense of tactile participatory relationships in his artworks. Through his artistic practice, Harsha also proposes a very interesting paradigm, in which the interaction becomes the perforative action- the understanding of how one can interact or how through the interaction meaning is being created. 

Harsha is known for his larger scale sculptural works, where he incorporate various materials and primarily wood as a material to manifest his artistic productions. Harsha’s artistic practice refers to various medieval and modern architectural examples, which are extremely symbolic and experiential at multiple levels. Philosophically the works refer to a sense of timelessness and the oscillation between the past and the present to highlight various layered, regional, personal and material histories. 

The recent body of works exhibited in the exhibition is also an extension of his engagements with sounds and rhythms. As an extension the works highlight a transition from microscopic incidents to an unrelated massiveness as a whole. The work: ‘intwined’, depicts the curling of leaves maybe an action to protect oneself from the harshness of life around. It is this interweaving of bodies, leaves and things that is manifested as a totem in his sculptural works. Similarly the line between shape and sound is blurred in the work: Sound of Rain. The form may be familiar, but it is possible that they will not help validate; they may need to be translated internally. The splash of a raindrop inspired the form, and the sound of the non-uniform motion is addressed throughout the piece. Raindrops, like everything else that falls, fall to the earth owing to gravity, but the beauty is in the moment of activity in between. The layered wood materiality plays a key part in drawing from the analogy of mineral layering found in earth crust. The works exhibited in the exhibition shows how material is an extension of the experience, and very beautifully highlights the poetics of the moment as well as in the subjectivity. At large, the works strongly refer to the beauty in the magni cation and the emptiness, timelessness in the transformative coexistences and the void in the incidents.  

Harsha Durugadda (born 1989) is a multidisciplinary artist working with sculpture and performance art. He is the winner of the Rio Tinto Sculpture Award 2017 at Sculpture by the Sea, Australia. He currently lives and runs his sculpture studio at Oorna farm surrounded by agricultural lands on the outskirts of Hyderabad where he implements permaculture principles to grow food and build with earthen architecture. Harsha has done a solo exhibition:’Whirling Out’, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi (2016). Harsha has participated in several group and curatorial exhibitions both nationally and Internationally, which includes ‘Abstract Mind’, CICA Museum, South Korea (2019); ‘Nord Art’, Budelsdorf, Germany (2018); ‘Sculpture by the Sea’, Cottesloe, Australia ( 2018, 2017 and 2016) and  ‘Seen: Unseen’, Art Centrix Space, New Delhi (2014); among others.  Durugadda’s sculptures have been exhibited internationally at Nord Art in Germany, Emergent Art Space in United States, London and Australia. In 2014, he was invited by the Courtauld Institute of Art to present on Ancient Buddhist Sculpture at the British Museum, London. He has received the Andrew Stretton Memorial invitation in 2016 at Sydney. Durugadda has received several awards, such as Biafarin Award, NordArt, Budeldorf, Germany (2018); Rio Tinto Sculpture Award, Sculpture by the Sea, Perth, Australia (2017); The Andrea Stretton Memorial Award, Sculpture by the Sea, Sydney (2016); and Fellowship, Unbox Festival supported by British Council, UK (2012); among others.

Harsha currently stays and works from Hyderabad, India.