Booth D 04
For India Art Fair 2024, our booth presents a curated excerpt of sculptures; corporeal investigations into materiality itself, as a concept, form, and experience. Our sculptures transform into a multitude of textures - concrete, graphite, copper, terracotta, stoneware, wood, glass - wherein each provokes a new way of seeing the familiar.
Neha Choksi’s Double Negative captivates your gaze, as a concrete stone cube appears to disintegrate whilst suspended above the ground. A dynamic capsule of shrinking time, Choksi’s work lingers on notions of erasure. In contrast, Shreyas Karle’s cube is composed of four tiles, and stays still, holding cement inside; a tense square captured almost in the midst of transforming into a cuboid, as each tile refuses to touch the other. Next to this cube, delicate textures of a destroyed house are woven into a small concrete fragment; Prajakta Potnis’s There was a home embodies the possibility of healing, of a renewed sense of belonging.
Materiality itself becomes the protagonist of Hemali Bhuta’s work - as an active agent in the making of each sculpture. Here, a large wooden board lies against the wall, with innumerable cuts and etches forming contingent geometric patterns. The artist sourced this abandoned plank from a stone cutting workshop in France, where in a former life, it was used as a base to cut stone slabs on. A thin graphite rod with linear cut markings accompanies the wooden plank. This materiality of graphite takes a dynamically different texture in Khageswar Rout’s sculptures, wherein terracotta is layered with finely grained graphite - a skin over clay, with forms that mimic our organic environment, yet appear extraterrestrial. For Mahesh Baliga and Raqs Media Collective, materiality is not abstracted but unravels through a more narrative turn, wherein the ordinary, upon a closer look, appears strange, unusual, and captivating - be it a terracotta hot water bag or a stack of handcrafted imaginary notebooks.
