The Guild Art Gallery is pleased to present, ‘Through a Glass, Darkly: Reflections on the Self Portrait’.The catalogue essay will be written by Dr. Deeptha Achar, Reader, Dept. of English, M.S.U. Baroda. The show features works by artists Vivan Sundaram, B.V. Suresh, Vasudevan Akkitham, Alok Bal, Sachidananda K.J, Sathyanand Mohan, Anpu Varkey, Lokesh Khodke, Ashutosh Bhardwaj, Rakhi Peswani, Puja Vaish, Piyush Thakkar and Lavanya Mani.

The last decade has seen sweeping transformations in the social and political landscape, bringing with it diverse social and psychic upheavals, real and virtual displacements. Related to this there has been the explosion and collision of, among others, various ethnic, religious, sexual, technological identities, bringing into play new subjectivities. The artist cannot but be implicated in these changes, which calls for a reappraisal of the centrality that notions of selfhood have (had) within society and the imagination. In such a situation the continuing significance and vitality of the genre of the self-portraiture in contemporary art is not surprising at all.

Today the self-portrait is the condition of seeing oneself, “through a glass, darkly”; - a diffuse reflection of the self as an actor in history, a hazy consciousness of possibilities that have not yet been, but could eventually be realized. Without being prescriptive, the show would like to look at the self-portrait as a genre that is of particular significance with regard to our complex relationship to the present (and in envisioning the future), and as a means of coming to terms with diverse conceptions of selfhood, authorship, location, identity and how these bear upon the twin practices of art and life.