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Sathyanand Mohan
Mirage
“The show called 'Mirage' comprises works that I have done in the
last two years; it is so titled in order to encompass most of the
works, which though disparate in style and content are unified by
a few underlying themes that I have been preoccupied with over the
last few years.
The first of these is the relationship between language and
representation, which is the underlying engagement of the set of
works titled 'Abecedaire'. Borrowing a simple formal element from
children's language primers, these works push the question of
interpretation, - not just of the art-work, but also of experience
itself, - to the foreground. We grasp the world through language,
- or to put it another way, the world comes to us as a
representation mediated through language which, far from being a
pure or neutral medium, is always already ideological. Thus
experience is always partial and the entry into language, which
makes us subjects of the world, necessarily comes at a price. One
could say that the subject matter of the work is the question of
interpretation itself and its relationship to subjectivity.
The works called 'Oracle' are also distantly related to the same
theme. Oracles were diviners and interpreters, with the ability to
read meaning into chance and randomness, perhaps reflecting a very
human desire to impose form and intelligibility on an otherwise
contingent and incoherent universe whose workings remain obscure
to us.
The interest in language and representation inevitably leads us to
its obverse, silence. It is in this sense that death, which occurs
as a metaphor in many of the works, is intimately tied to
language, - as the place where it ceases, and which thereby marks
its limit. The French philosopher Jacques Lacan called this the
Real, - which he defined as “that which resists symbolization
entirely.” The Real is of course unrepresentable. Apart from,
obviously, death, trauma was for Lacan an exemplary instance of
the impasse of language. Seen this way, silence has a necessarily
political dimension to it, - primarily in what Lacan calls the
death in the Symbolic, where someone is cast out or excommunicated
from the linguistic and cultural life-world of the community and
made a pariah. To be deprived of a voice is to be politically
disenfranchised, silenced; it is worth remembering that, for
instance, Gayatri Spivak's canonical essay is called “Can the
Subaltern Speak?”.
These are some of the themes that I have been exploring in the
last two or three years, and the body of work that I am showing as
part of this show hopefully reflects some of these concerns.”
Sathyanand Mohan
Born in Kerala, 1975, he has done his BFA in Painting from The
Government College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum, 1994-1998. MFA in
Printmaking from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Ms University Baroda,
1998-2000. He has been a part of Singapore Art Fair 2011, Dubai
Art Fair 2011, India Art Summit
2011, KIAF 09, India Art Summit 09, 'Armory Show' 09, New York and
'ART HK 09', Hongkong
represented by The Guild, Mumbai. His first solo was ‘Reliquary’,
held at The Guild, Mumbai in 2009. Some of his group exhibitions
include Alternate to Another, The Guild Art USA Inc., New York; A
New Vanguard: Trends in Contemporary Indian Art, Saffronart, New
York; The Guild, New York; Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on
the Self-Portrait, The Guild, Mumbai.
On view till May 26, 2012 |
