Rooted identity

The blank canvas may seem barren to us but it contains the many indelible stories an artist has already envisaged for it. It’s only through form and colour that those notions become visible to us. Rooted presents one such set of adaptations that reflect the fons et origo of the thought process by the displayed artists. Anchored by curators, Kristine Michael and Paul Sengupta, artists Harendra Kushwaha, Khokan Giri, Japneet Keith, Mudita Bhandari and Neha Grewal, offer personal notions that are worth sharing.
This is helmed by Gallery Espace as the first in a new series called Curators Pick, being instated on the occasion of its 30th anniversary. It will be held once every two years wherein senior artists will curate works by upcoming artists.

Khokan Giri is a printmaker who hails from a remote village in coastal Bengal. His ‘rootedness’ manifests through the things he saw growing up, dominant among which were boats, nets and traps of fishermen. Their textural detailing becomes the basis of his creative construction. “Objects that are the means of livelihood of this coastal community, came to constitute Giri’s visual vocabulary. He took them out of their mundaneness and viewed them as architectonic constructions,” says Sengupta, adding, “He narrows into the hull of the boat, studying its complex interlocked structure. From structures that resemble barrel-vaulted cathedral ceilings, he graduated to humbler subjects of fishing traps and nets, breaking through their interwoven skeletons to create ephemeral optical illusions that converge and diverge like the ebb and flow of the tide itself.”

Using local paper and textile to create a rooted visual dialogue is artist Harendra Kushwaha who reflects on the Terai foothills of Nepal, where he hails from. “Through Nepali paper, gunny bags, and Nepali Dhaka, he sculpts the Terai with a yearning that is almost heartbreaking in its fragility. Operating between two-dimensional constructions and relief sculpture, Kushwaha is deeply immersed in his material and making, located almost completely in the land that courses through his veins,” shares Sengupta.

Mudita Bhandari dabbles with concepts of space and time through her series, Beyond Walls. Her terracotta sculptures look for home or at least the idea of it. It begins with a look at our walled urban spaces and how we interpret time within it. It also searches how the mind adapts to it. “In this work, small reliefs and models of open houses raise questions about the relationship between the inner and outer worlds, between social hierarchies and those at the margins of a city. She searches for the meaning of home and memory which will end in the centreing of self,” says Michael.

Japneet Keith, a ceramic artist from Chandigarh, centres her work on the continuous change visible in nature, while Neha Grewal’s canvas depicts domestic spaces, all toying with the idea of home as rooted manifestations of a brooding mind.

Till: September 28
At: Gallery Espace, 16, Community Center, near Surya Hotel, New Friends Colony