• Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019
  • Collection of Undoings

    1X1 Art Gallery / March 18, 2019 - April 30, 2019

Collection of Undoings

Collection of Undoings

           In the beginning there is a myth. The myth is made up of darkness and a devouring machine programmed to take up whatever is on offer. No excess collects in corners. Words clasp their meanings tightly, lined up like pressed palms. 

            A red slit appears eventually, disrupting the order. A single cell containing its own intelligence begins to multiply. It blooms, a slow spread. There is no hurry, no ticking time, no expectations to fulfill, only the nascent pleasure of discovering its own form. It does not cling, it does not apply force. It coats the surface, thick as felt. 
            The origin of this dropped stitch is elusive. Some say it is a memory, nostalgia for which there is no record. Desire is born out of the murk, a neglected child left unattended, covered in scales and feathers, leaving larvae in its wake. 
            A tremor passes through the world. A black square, swathes of primary colors, unmixed, birth the original signs. First a line, then a cross, and then the other letters are ushered forth. Unspoken thoughts accumulate in clouds, pregnant, ready to burst. Sentences pile up, discarded and unfinished, giving shape to the landscape. An ellipsis scatters into stars. A comma takes residence in the night sky. 
            Small traces of the physical appear. Breath, particles of skin, perspiration, a low hum, fibers of cloth, tangles of hair. They trail each other for a while, fumbling and seeking, hiding behind trees and in riverbeds. They catch the edge of each other’s existence, breath drying sweat, flakes of skin vibrating beside a murmur. Everything begins as a game, a meeting and a breaking apart, an experiment of what happens when their shells meet. At times these encounters turn violent (capturing, containing) because there is no shared language between the weighted and the weightless. Force is misconstrued as anger, sensitivity as indifference. 
            The voice is the first to realize its sonic potential. It lowers its tone to a whisper and fills the ears of the others. Unable to differentiate between an outer and inner voice, they obey, finding a formation like soldiers. The voice gains confidence and the others name it a god. They go about the business of building, coming together and creating a structure with their own molecules. Sweat, breath and skin. Together the church they build is a body. The voice makes a home in the mind but the memory of the voice’s original whisper lives in every cell, and the new body holds tightly to the belief that a god lives outside and not within.
            On the day the body is complete, the sun flickers like a bulb in the sky. The body begins constructing his world. He builds a monument to the voice in this head, in the form of a deity, carving shapes into trees and stones. He builds tools that look like the sounds around him, tools like letters to communicate with the ground when he begins to dig.
            Around this time he encounters Desire who has completed her slow project of circling the earth. Half-bird, half-jewel. They copulate but it is not enough. He decides to consume Desire, cooks her over an open flame, bones, feathers and flesh, but he finds he is still hungry. Hungry and alone.
            Cutting his head open in frustration, creatures rush out from his thoughts, images emerge, dreams of what his life should look like. Staring into his own head, he sees a face, clear and bright. It has eyes that resemble his own, it seems to know what he longs to say, its mouth follows along with his. Captivated by this other, he does not comprehend that he has only found a mirror and that he can never know another, only reflections of himself.

- Text by Avni Doshi

* In association with Usha Gawde Advisory

 

T. Venkanna unpacks sexuality and taboo by considering the tension between sexual fantasies and culturally normative encounters within the unconscious. By finding the grey area between  human and animal, or even life and death, Venkanna offers an image of a world that is at once liberates and dismantles societal codes.

Inspired by the template of educational posters circulating in India, Roshan Chhabriaemploys drawing to examine his own upbringing in a middle-class Sindhi household. Through satire and innuendo, he evokes a picture of modern India that is at once poignant and alienated.

Birender Yadav uses found object as inspiration for his work. By bringing together diverse and sometimes surprising materials, changing an object through enlargement and focusing on texture, he comments on the history and labor behind the making of mundane objects.

Sunoj D is interested in the infra-thin spaces that exist between one moment and the next. Using materials like wax and soot, which continue to change, he considers the ephemeral state of the art object.

Inspired by his background in theatre, Ritesh Mesharamincorporates performance into his work. His sculptures consist of domestic objects pushed to the boundary of use and even reason, no longer able to fulfill their original functions. 

Bhuvanesh Gowda uses organic and salvaged materials to create his sculptures, collecting objects before reconstituting them. Engaging in a meditative process, Gowda allows forms to reveal themselves, where the constituent parts are allowed to interact for the final form to emerge.

For Sujith SN, painting continues to be an endlessly interesting and relevant medium. He paints vibrant skies and landscapes, playing with the movement of light through atmosphere.

In his sculpures, Madhusudhan explores colonial history. The image of the mirror, which appears again and again in his work, acts as a metaphor for the ever-shifting crisis of identity for the citizen of the post-colonial state.

Benita Perciyal’s sculptures are reminiscent of small altars and carry the transcendental weight of worship. She uses materials such as frankincense, myrrh, cinnamon, cloves, lemongrass, cedar wood and bark powder which imbibe her objects with an olfactory experience. The effect on the viewer is multisensory, creating an experience where smell elicits personal memories.

Sonia Mehra Chawla considers ideas of genesis, growth and decay in her works. In small petri dishes, bacteria and microbes grow, proliferating and blooming into unique formations. 

Gopikrishna paints elaborate narratives filled with imagined and surreal creatures and landscapes. His work combines the familiar with the absurd, using known imagery and transforming it into his