Booth D04
For India Art Fair 2025, our booth takes a dual (and dynamic) approach into the elemental: thinking through the materiality of nature and the sublime expanses of our night sky. With each artwork, the elemental exhumes its immanent political textures, inviting viewers to rediscover our relation to matter, material, and memory.
Hemali Bhuta and Munem Wasif draw your gaze upon ordinary objects: be it lac, indigo pigments, or an unassuming grain of rice. As you look closer, their ordinary compositions refract a complex web of narratives, contradictory histories hidden in plain sight. Bhuta's large fabric appears as an immersive, delicate space of refuge. This cloth embodies the artist's research into the materiality of lac: its extraction from nature, labour intensive methods of processing, and reckless disposal into the river Tajna. Her indigo dye - a deeply political pigment - draws a parallel with Munem Wasif's sterile yet wounded blue toned cyanotype prints. Here, isolated grains of indigenous seeds and plants echo colonial anguish, specifically the 1944's famine. At the same time, Wasif's spectral prints become an archive of their own material existence, rendered precarious with the growth of genetically engineered grains and western pesticides.
The organic takes a different, corporeal approach in Khageswar Rout's stoneware sculpture: a split seed is shrouded in skin-like form. Rout continues his probe into the relation between human and nature - wherein plant forms, at times, appear to mimic human anatomy, as he traces the molecular patterns intrinsic to both. His sculptures are fragile, vulnerable, and at once a metaphor for growth and decay. On the other hand, for Khandakar Ohida, the human body - specifically the female body - becomes a vessel of grief, violence, and resistance. Her paintings do not merely document historical oppression, but rather, suffuse our imaginary with the hues of magical realism and symbolic encounters. In turn, these works become narratives of gentle affirmation even as it depicts quotidian horror. Rethinking the tradition of miniature painting, Ohida's female protagonists tell stories not only of violence, but of dreams, fears, and a radical solidarity.
In contrast, Rohini Devasher, Prajakta Potnis, and Raqs Media Collective invite viewers to glance above, into the abyss of the ever-present yet inscrutable night sky. For Potnis, the night sky is as much a witness to the humanitarian crises as it is a roof to the bodies displaced in their aftermath. Her disjointed, slate stone works appear to have fallen off the sky as jagged tablets, the marks on their surface reflecting the topographies beneath.
In their compelling light and text installation, 'Disappearing Stars', Raqs Media Collective thinks through the immensity of the cosmos, a space that holds both what we can and can never see, a fraction of our history, and a slice of time. To quote the artists: "the light that reaches our eyes may be alive (if light can live) but not the star... the night sky is a register of absences, disappearing stars that are still made present by time." In a parallel gesture, Rohini Devasher focuses on a single star: the sun. She deliberately uses copper - a metal forged in the hearts of massive stars, which catapulted onto our planet more than four billion years ago. Devasher transforms the surface of these paper-thin copper sheets through interventions like acid washing, embossing, and fumage. In her radiant and luminous works, the artist explores new cosmologies between the human and non-human, by examining the interplay between place, observer, and observation.
Booth A06 (Focus)
In Geopolitical Drops, earthy elements transform into an immersive sculptural
encounter, a surreal experience that compels a rethinking of our perspectival
paradigms: delicate raindrops expand into fossilised terracruda whereas a cosmic
sphere occupies quiet refuge on the ground. Trupti Patel continues her research and
artistic exploration of the relation between human and non-human, discovering it to
be an intrinsically tenuous and political discourse.
Rendered in earthy tones, each terracruda fragment contains pigments sourced from the soil of a political state in India; thus, the 28 drops embody the asymmetric yet interwoven relation between between 28 political territories that construct
‘nationhood’. As you look closer into each terracruda sculpture, yet another drop
appears, taking the form of individual wheat kernels delicately embedded on the
surface. These isolated kernels gather into a crevice of a dark spherical form,
captured sliced, luminous, and wounded, in a corner. Cast in the lustre of resin, from a distance, the sphere contrasts the corporeal hues of terracruda. This surreal,
planetary form, however, holds imprints of the ordinary: wheat spikes, kernels, and a
fragmented human hand cast in bronze. Patel’s installation, Geopolitical Drops
exhumes the obscured politics inherent in cultivation, drawing our gaze into the
precarious condition of farmers.
Geopolitical Drops sparks a temporal, political, and formal dialogue with
Differentiated Totality / Indian Landscape, a series of intricate terracruda paper relief drawings by the artist. Object’s aren’t quite as they appear to be, as Patel laboriously excavates a depth in her sculpted drawings. She layers precise pigments on sliced paper, each sourced from a political state, as in her sculptural installation. However, Differentiated Totality / Indian Landscape comprises 29 layers of soil - not 28 - for Patel created this series back in 2017, when the bifurcation of Jammu & Kashmir into two union territories (and their subsequent erasure) was yet to arrive. In these paper relief drawings, the figures - cast in complex political soil - appear light, porous, suspended despite their material, archival weight. This dream-like, gentle, oneiric quality extends to her smaller, delicate drawings, each a probe into the sensorial relation between politics and nature.
For Trupti Patel, material morphs into a dynamic metaphor - not only as a symbol, but also a corporeal sensation - that compels a deeper perspective into social structures. Each element is deliberately precise, as her rigorous and labour intensive process of making becomes as crucial as the final form of the sculpture. This work invokes an intimate, sensitive encounter - despite the large scale - as her materiality alludes to the irrevocable, mortal cycles of time, nature, and humanity.
