Need a Show for this Title
My work was part of an exhibition titled Need a Show for this Title, held on the campus of CalArts in galleries D300 & D301 from 10 November to 11 November 2016. This exhibition was centered around the diverse language of painting in MA Art program at CalArts.
Faith in Paris
Artist Shweta Bhattad was part of exhibition “Sharing Our Stories”: Global South Social Movements on climate change, which was organized during COP21. During this exhibition, she conducted her performance Faith where she buried herself in ground, in a coffin for several hours, continuously writing the word Faith. The concept of “faith” comes as a continuation of Shweta’s engagement with farmers from India and across the globe. Through her performance she aims to create awareness about farmers’ plight across the world.
As part of this global project, she invited artists from around the world to share their concerns and ideas about the current farming scenario. Among other collaborators, I contributed a video sharing my concerns about environment and organic farming. The video was projected in Paris during the UN climate conference and in Nagpur, India on 7 December 2015.
Beginning of a composition
Fragments
Art and Ecology
Of course, our human-made artifacts inevitably retain an element of more-than-human otherness. This unknowability, this otherness, resides more often in the materials from which the object is made. The tree trunk of the telephone pole, the clay of the bricks from which the building is fashioned, the smooth metal alloy of the car door we lean against-all these still carry, like our bodies, the textures and rhythms of a pattern that we ourselves did not devise, and their quiet dynamism responds directly to our senses. Too often, however, this dynamism is stifled within mass-produced structures closed off from the rest of the earth, imprisoned within technologies that plunder the living land. The superstraight lines and right angles of our office architecture, for instance, make our animal senses wither even as they support the abstract intellect; the wild, earth-born nature of the materials-the woods, clays, metals, and stones that went into the building-are readily forgotten behind the abstract and calculable form.
From The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram
Pages out of my Sketchbook
Repetition
Schoenberg said that everything is repetition, even variation. On the other hand, we can say that repetition doesn’t exist, that two leaves of the same plant are not repetitions of each other, but are unique. Or two bricks on the building across the street are different. And when we examine them closely, we see that they are in deed different in some respect, if only in the respect of how they receive light, because they are at different points in space. In other words, repetition really has to do with how we think. And we cant think either that things are being repeated, or that they are not being repeated. If we think that they are being repeated, it is generally because we don’t pay attention to all of the details. But if we pay attention as though we were looking through a microscope to all of the details, we see that there is no such thing as repetition.
John Cage
Affordable Art Fair, Hampstead
Process in Exile
My work was selected to be part of the exhibition Process in Exile presented by Made in Arts London, an arts organisation working with emerging talent from University of the Arts London. The exhibition brought together a highly curated collection of art and design from students and recent graduates of UAL.
Read the review of the exhibition Here
No Orange Triangle 