"A crustacean creeps along on the coarse grains of a salt pan, a white expanse fills the screen. It’s an innocuous, spare opening to the dystopic lushness that follows and ends in a mutant utopia. Shah’s video installation, is a trans-millennial ride down evolutionary road that straddles ecosystems, sexuality, gender and civilizations.
Her methods are multivalent, reminiscent of Mathew Barney,
it’s multi-referential and many layered. A single horned mythical creature, a unicorn, is her device, (referencing and building upon Rebecca Horn’s Einhorn, presented at documenta V,
1972, which Horn had based on Frida Kahlo’s painting, The
Broken Column) to probe and penetrate several stories that run simultaneously, symbiotically. Roaming the wastelands of Shah’s weird landscapes possessed of a strange beauty, these humanhorned time travellers, flash codes from the past, get washed up on shores, play under the sea in a coral garden, roam a plastic wrapped rainforest and end up in a bizarre version of utopia."
- Deepika Sorabjee reviews Tejal Shah's Between the Waves at Project 88, Mumbai.
