Title: Surfaces of the irreal (2018)

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An installation, displayed in New Museum Triennale, February to May 2018, called “Songs of Sabotage” curated by Gary Carrion- Murayari and Alex Gartenfeld.

Special thanks to Aditya Srinivas Mopidevi (curator) for writing keynote about my work for the exhibition catalogue. Thanks to Vadehra art gallery, Delhi for their support. 

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Site: New Museum, New York.

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Dimension: Variable.

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Media: Xerox and archival prints, painted banners, posters and festoon on handwoven and rough cotton cloth, painted canvas, watercolour painting on paper pasted on cloth, charcoal drawing on paper pasted on cloth, ledger cutting text on fibreglass, Chinese ink drawing on uncut handmade paper, graphite drawings, pinback badges, reflective tape, poster stickers, printed text and a diary full of drawings by watercolour, ink, pen, sticker, gouache, cotton cloth, matchbox and fibreglass.

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Description:

Space, I strive in is an irreal entity of contrast and diversity; a world within, paralyzed and blurred by the very notion of it. Space where the idea of diversity incorporates multi-layered foliage. While the idea of 'unity' has been moulded to become a canon that ricochet.

The 'irreal surfaces' is the steadfast account of the inequitable space around me. Ironically, the idea of unity itself vanquishes the spatial limits and resonates 'the excess of resistances on the face of 'excess of oppression'.

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Excess is something that comes from the understanding of the representational impossibility of the subject, a subject which is a synthesis of form and flux. This work consists of identifying different works from the politically turbulent period of last 10 years placed alongside a set of recent works, thereby an attempt to locate the contemporary presence of those same historical discourses.

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With the contradiction and consequences of such relevant developments, I have attempted to create an irreal landscape. Whereas there is yet another landscape, as I mentioned earlier, which defies spatial limits which are a landscape of resistance; one of collective consciousness, a consistent element that breathes life both in tribal land grab movements in Bastar and Odisha on one hand, and native American land movement (against Dakota pipeline) on the other.

Such is the narrative of my ideas which don't end in themselves, but only a morbid beginning for a new and at the same time an ever-present outlook.