How does one paint the sky?
An unfathomable expanse, the sky is as much a witness to the humanitarian crises unfolding on the ground as it is a roof to the bodies displaced in their aftermath. An erratic fixture, the night sky changes appearance in tandem with location—raining, shining, or choking its refugees. What does it mean for the sky to bear witness? Is it inexorably altered by these acts of witnessing?
In this solo exhibition, Prajakta Potnis directs her attention to how the everyday is imbued with the uncanny. Re-contextualising her abiding interest in the ways in which objects and landscapes get assimilated into deep time, the artist wonders about the future of the current crisis on both human and planetary scales. In her practice, Potnis has established troubling intimacies—between the nuclear war and the kitchen, between ingestion and annihilation, and between temporal registers—through experiments in scale. In this exhibition, she uses scale to visibilise the intangible exceptions in the everyday.
The night sky is materialised through a play of medium, texture, and density. A series of paintings reproduce the weight of its darkness in slate. Used as roof tiles and blackboards, the slate is a geological mirror to the night sky. Dispersed in the gallery space, these slates seem to have fallen off the sky as jagged tablets, the marks on their surface reflecting the topographies beneath. Is the sky starting to collapse under the weight of its nightmares?
The artist also directs her cogitations inward to the visualisation of trauma as both a concept and a feeling. What does trauma look like? Straying from representational logic, she attributes a tangible quality to trauma and paints it as an animate being. Manifesting as mould, roots, or a festering wound, trauma is ascribed weight and smell in its recalcitrant presence in a domestic room. This room defies the normative coordinates of space and time. It is a realm of absolute flatness, and dimensional only in the warped movements of the traumatic mass. Built through successive layers of paint, the flat of the grey in these paintings is a stratagem, inviting one to imagine depth against absence.
The title of the exhibition has been borrowed from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, The Earth Is Closing On Us. It gestures to a world shrinking on aggrieved bodies and their homes. Potnis’s illustration of a bulldozed house comprises a repetitive process of drawing and erasing, and bears the imprint of a floral fabric that takes the image out of the consolidated syntax of news media and places it in a personal album. A reference to the systematised decimation of vulnerable homes, the image registers as both memory and residue.
The exhibition eventually gestures to a momentum building around this residue. Recalling the routine sight of lightweight refuse gathering on floor corners, a situated video in the gallery shows stones converging and swirling in urgent, rhythmic motion—as if propelled by an internal logic. On perusal, the stones seem to portend something unusual brewing on the ground. Having assumed agency against gravity, they are perhaps nudging towards another sky.
- Najrin Islam
