India Art Fair 2022

The curatorial premise for our India Art Fair 2022 booth foregrounds the idea of the artist being a harbinger of change - one who is painfully aware that life has presented an unprecedented opportunity for the world to come together in order to achieve something that has been never possible singularly so far. Together, the works generate a sense of being at the edge of something powerful, creating a tenuous situation wherein, a reimagining and revaluation of actions and practices is not only imperative but also critical. As the senior art critic and curator Premjish Achari says - The works constantly leap forward from blind certitudes, chartering the future where art constantly activates thought and life. Our booth hopes to illuminate the threshold between life and extinction and activate life in that chasm. The works are an attempt to introduce a significant change in visuality that challenges planarity, perspectives and thematic assumptions. While the scientific imaging turns all phenomena into visualisable form for reading, these images are made to be experienced. These works point to a sense of wonder at the potential diversity of the practise of image making.

The presented works also show a path to this illumination; of marking our lines in the sand. Why does humanity want to leave a mark? Is it, as history proposes, that humans want to proclaim - we were here ? Or is it that we make marks because it is intrinsic to the evolution of our brain/mind and how it expresses itself into the physical world?

Through the idea of making ‘Our Line in The Sand’ our booth proposes a cross-disciplinary analytical framework to investigate ways in which things become cognitive extensions of the human body. Using a variety of examples and case studies, Malafouris, in his Material Engagement Theory proposed that mark-making constitutes a salient point of intersection between matter and memory; one in which the plasticity of the mind becomes entangled with the plasticity (or stability) of material culture. The artist's work proposes an analytical approach to demonstrate how the making of art is a cognitive extension of our body and how the process itself is integral to human cognitive and cultural evolution.

- Monica Jain, April 2022