The Project 88 booth will showcase artworks that reconsider the way we occupy and inhabit physical spaces. Through phenomenological, imaginative, and material deliberations, the works conjure both - the sensorial and the conceptual.
Amitesh Shrivastava’s paintings employ thick and impulsive brushstrokes to explore human relationships with natural settings. Joy at Cliff captures the exhilaration that one experiences while standing at the edge of a precipice. Shrivastava renders minute details such as blades of grass, scurrying creatures, and other interactions that become more apparent as one’s senses are heightened.
In Trespassers II, Shrivastava blurs boundaries between forms and landscapes to comment upon how political and socio-economic constructs of land ownership and subsequent notions of encroachment define the way spaces are distributed arbitrarily.
Shrivastava’s Yellow Horse is about the amalgamation of disparate elements such as sand and milk. For the artist, a ‘Yellow Horse’ may emerge as an embodiment of the unfelt and unseen energies that manifest when one successfully departs from rigid frameworks to open up to change and possibility.
Hemali Bhuta’s Series of Drawings, formally explore verticality and horizontality to examine how spaces are constructed. The series exposes markings that seemingly suggest that the line begins even before it is actualised as a drawing, reflecting upon constructs that are ostensibly eternal yet historically specific.
Khageswar Rout’s Study of Nothing III studies vegetal growth to highlight the architectonic forms within our natural surroundings. Through his sculptural process that highlights the intricacy and fragility of his subject, Rout simultaneously eternalises organic matter that is otherwise perishable and undergoing constant transformation.
Neha Choksi’s brass and basalt sculptures, Blank invitation 9 & 11, recall physical geographies and geological time. Through her material processes, Choksi deliberately transforms ‘nature’ into objects that serve aesthetic functions to contemplate our relationships with the landscapes we occupy and engage with.
Raqs Media Collective’s Toxicity in Equal Measures responds to how societies obsessively pursue idealistic notions of purity that rely on the relegation of toxicity to something unnatural and pejorative. By revealing the inherent instability and toxicity within all materials, the work summons alternative considerations of how we can live with this reality.
Sandeep Mukherjee’s Fabric Diagrams: Imaging the Body studies a corporeal body using aluminium and burlap sheets, drawing attention to the varying rates of flow within each of these materials. The work emphasises how every element around us is animated.
