Project 88 is pleased to present Stalkings and other stories curated by Prajna Desai with works by Rehaan Engineer, Sanjeev Mirajkar, and Amitesh Shrivastava. What happens when a visual vocabulary forks, splits off further, much like a stalk, and stays stalk-like? What happens when evolving a story is not about getting ahead but about slowing down, repeating, and deliberating? Using narrative as a point of departure, this show triangulates three distinct modes of developing narrative that are at once visually irreconcilable and resonant by being deeply personal and resistant to linear storytelling.
Right from the start, Rehaan Engineer has yoked line drawings and words, written either by hand, typeset on a manual typewriter, or rubber stamped on paper substrates. His basic vocabulary is as much the balance between clean drawing or simple photographic transfers and often crypto-ironic text as the A4 size surfaces he favours, for subjects ranging philosophical texts, diaristic content, and beloved shapes, such as his lovers’ mouths. In contrast, Sanjeev Mirajkar’s painstaking photorealism - some might call it a throwback to still-life painting - uses the forms of moulded packaging material to create images of architectural spaces he would like to inhabit, but prefers never get built. Speed of execution might easily be Amitesh Shrivastava’s principal mode that uniformly feeds his small pen and ink drawings and sizeable acrylics made of high-velocity daubs and pointedly disconnected vignettes that re-imagine his experience of migration to Mumbai from Chhattisgarh. What does narrative evolution look like when it loses the plot and instead transmutes into a wide range of atmospherics? This, at least, is one question the show asks you to ponder.
- Text by Prajna Desai
