Rakhi  Peswani

Inside the Melancholic Object (an elegy for a migrant worker)

19^th century history of cotton and coffee is conjured to confront the formation of the other. Both the materials are replete with certain unclaimed truths about body and labor. Monotony and repetition as processes are drawn to re-contextualize the metaphoric potential of these materials. These physical, laborious processes are layered with the residual aspects of liquids and the suspended weight of masses. Surface treatment of ‘dyeing’, the process of coloring cloth, is conjoined with its antonym, ‘fading’, where, the used, and the worn, are seen as representations of many, often disregarded, bodies.

Through, the spatial and haptic languages of sculpture, the viewer’s body is brought closer inside the abstract spaces of desolation and melancholia. 

Peswani received the Inlaks Scholarship for the UNIDEE in residence at Cittadellarte, Fondazione Pistoletto in 2006. Peswani’s museum exhibitions include Ghar ghar Ki baat/Tales from two homes curated by Heidi Fichtner and Vikki Mc Innes at Margaret Lawerence Gallery Victorian College of the Arts The University Melbourne in 2013. Fruits of Labor (a Monument to Exhaustion) at Hangzhou Triennial of Fibre Arts Zehjiang Art Museum Hangzhou,PRC in 2013; Zones of Contact propositions for the Museum. co-curated by Vidya Shivadas, Akansha Rastogi, Deekshanath, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Noida in 2013; Generation in Transition New Art from India  in  2011 at Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland and Contemporary Art Centre, Lithuania; Bring Me A Lion: An Exhibition of Contemporary Indian Art, The Hunt Gallery, St. Louis, Missouri in 2010; Potters in Peril 2001 at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai.  Rakhi was invited for a residency in The Hague, where she showed Bodies / Subterrain (Eurydice & Sita), at Vrije Academie in 2011, Artists’ residency at Sanskriti Kendra, Sanskrithi Pratishthan, New Delhi in 2007 and PEERS-2003’ residency invitation from KHOJ, New Delhi. Her recent solo exhibitions include Anatomy of Silence  2013 at The Guild, Mumbai; Matters Under the Skin  2011, Art HK – Asia One, Hong Kong, presented by The Guild, Mumbai; Intertwinings, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi and Sonnet for Silent Machines at Jehangir Nicholson Gallery and  The Guild, Mumbai.

Peswani recently joined as a faculty at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bengaluru. She taught at S N School of Arts and Communication, Hyderabad Central University, prior to this.

T V Santhosh 

Effigies of Turbulent Yesterdays

“The genre of the landscape can be understood, among other things, as a product of the encounter between the pastoral imagination and the aspirations of an emergent landed gentry, whose relationship to their property is often the ostensible subject matter of the paintings. Apart from whatever aesthetic qualities that these works might have, they allude to a history of dispossession of jointly held resources, - largely through the private enclosure of open fields that had been farmed collectively by the peasantry over centuries, - a history that remains invisible in the paintings themselves.  In a similar way, the equestrian portrait can be seen as a figuration of power. It’s relative rarity is perhaps the result of generic conventions that tied it to an essentially commemorative purpose, but coupled with the fact that in the history of portraiture it is the powerful who have until recently had the privilege of being represented, one can see that it functioned almost exclusively in the service of ruling elite in establishing and extending their authority over their subjects. In painting, the equestrian figure is also implicated in conquest, as he traverses a landscape that he metaphorically colonizes or administers and which became (or was) his fiefdom, acquired and maintained more often than not through the exercise of illegitimate power.

These iconographic conventions are here stood on their head (or lack thereof). In ‘Effigies of Turbulent Yesterdays’ we have a clash of different linguistic registers, with the powerful mimetic realism of the equestrian portrait meeting head on the schematized fountain of blood that springs from it, whose sources one can trace to miniature painting as well as comic book illustration. If the King is the Head of the State, then a decapitated monument is both a ludicrous and pitiful spectacle, - an act of iconoclasm which, like all forms of subversion attempts not to destroy it, but to turn it into an inverted representation of itself, or in this case, into an anti-monument that lays bare the disavowed histories of violence that sustain it, and by extension all such iconographies of power. The King famously has two bodies, a physical one that will eventually be subject to infirmity and death, and a symbolic one which metonymically stands in for the body politic and which continues to extend its dominion, by coercion or consent through the accoutrements of power. This act of symbolic regicide thus exemplifies the truth of every iconoclastic gesture, - the recognition that every contestation of power starts with the destruction of the images through which it’s authority continues to be exercised and reproduced,  - and thereby indicates the limits of sovereign power itself”.  – Sathyanand Mohan

Born in Kerala, T.V. Santhosh obtained his graduate degree in painting from Santiniketan and Masters degree in Sculpture from M. S. University, Vadodara. Santhosh’s works have been shown widely in Museums and Biennales. Some of the museum shows include: ‘WAR ZONE – Indian Contemporary Art’, ARTEMONS CONTEMPORARY,  Das Kunstmuseum, Austria, 2012; ‘Critical Mass: Contemporary Art from India’, curated by Tami Katz-Freiman and  Rotem Ruff, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, 2012; 11^th Havanna Biennial, 2012; ‘INDIA- LADO A LADO’, curated by Tereza de Arruda, SESC  Belenzinho Sao Paulo, Brazil 2012; ‘India’, curated by Pieter Tjabbes and Tereza de Arruda, Centro Cultural Banco do  Brasil in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2011; 4^th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, ‘Rewriting Worlds’, curated by Peter Weibel, 2011; ‘In Transition New Art from India’, Surrey Museum of Art, Canada, 2011; Collectors’ Stage: Asian Contemporary Art from Private Collections, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, 2011; ‘Crossroads: India Escalate’, Prague Biennale 5, 2011; ‘Empire Strikes Back’, The Saatchi Gallery, London, 2010; ‘The Silk Road, New Chinese, Indian and Middle Eastern Art’ from The Saatchi Gallery at Tri Postal, Lille, France, 2010; Vancouver Biennale curated by Barry Mowatt, 2010; ‘Dark Materials’, curated by David Thorp, G S K Contemporary show, at Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2009; ‘India Xianzai’, MOCA, Shanghai, China, 2009; ‘Passage to India, Part II: New Indian Art from the Frank Cohen Collection’, at Initial Access, Wolverhampton, UK, 2009; ‘Aftershock, Conflict, Violence and Resolution in Contemporary Art’,  Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, UEA Norwich, 2007; ‘Continuity and Transformation’, Museum show promoted by Provincia di Milano, Italy, 2007.

          His select solo shows include ‘The Land’, Nature Morte, Berlin 2011, ‘Burning Flags’, Aicon Gallery, London 2010, ‘Blood and Spit’, Jackshainman Gallery 2009, ‘Living with a Wound’, Grosvenor Vadehra, London 2009, ‘A Room to Pray’ at Avanthay Contemporary, Zurich 2008, ‘Countdown’, Nature Morte, Delhi 2008  in collaboration with The Guild, Mumbai; ‘Countdown’, The Guild, Mumbai 2008