Writing

The title ‘poka-yoke,’ or the practice of mistake-proofing in an assembly line, is used ironically, owing to the impossibility of a singular outcome of experience when engaging with visual art. Through a range of media including painting, video, computer programming, participation and printmaking, works on view seek to challenge the notion of artistic agency, when chance is an integral player in the creation and reception of works.

As the Voyager 1 space probe was leaving the Solar System upon completion of its mission, it was ordered to turn around by astronomer Carl Sagan (for no pre-determined scientific objective) to take a selfie of the Earth, resulting in the iconic image Pale Blue Dot. The impulse to understand life and our place on earth from the standpoint of being both within and without similarly preoccupies Schwendinger.

Drawing Index is a group show featuring three emerging artists - Sujeeth Kumar Sree Kandan, Vasundhara Shankari Sellamuthu, and Arvind Sundar. Viewing drawing as a shared lexicon of mark making, works on display seek to unpack questions around systems of representation, authorship, and everyday life through a range of media including paint, screen-printing, cement, etching on steel, and soot on canvas.

Transport networks are incredible junctions of crossover – of people, ideas and experiences. Our 10×10 theme this year focuses on the Elizabeth line, Europe’s largest contemporary infrastructure project. Through its development, key transport hubs along its route have transformed the urban landscape, offering us a new experience of the city. Our abstracted grid of 100 squares traces the route of the Elizabeth line through central London, from Paddington station to Whitechapel.

It’s not often that architects are commissioned to make an artwork or artists requested to respond to a site. Architectural aid charity Article 25 annually offers 100 top architects, designers and artists the chance to respond to an area of London through an artwork. The brainchild of architect Tim Makower, ‘10x10’ is a special project that results in the making and donation of 100 unique art objects in response to an area of London, offering 100 perspectives of the city.

Battarahalli Corner continues artist Sheela Gowda’s longstanding engagement with structures of formal artistic language, abstraction and representation, both in the pictorial and three-dimensional sense. The works intend to heighten a viewer’s experience of what is perceived, so that, observing what are often found objects, one is led to question and apprehend multiple meanings embedded within materials.

Structured around the floor plan of the gallery space, an erstwhile Colonial cottage, each artist’s work occupies one of four rooms. This was intended as an allusion to the narrative structure of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a book of independent short stories by Daniyal Mueenuddin. Like the underlying strains of connectivity in Mueenuddin’s book, the connectivity between object, subject and space was deliberately left open to viewers, so they may bring to the show their subjective readings and associations.

Gardening the Archive presents textile interventions and a series of prints by David Alesworth, an English artist-gardener who has lived and worked in Pakistan for over twenty years. Weaving geospatial narratives into the layered space of traditional carpets, Alesworth explores the landscape of repurposed carpets as a site of complex historical and political associations.

who must write these lines, a solo exhibition of sculptural installations, photography and drawing by Sudarshan Shetty explores the idea of authorship and the conceptual constructs of our value system through the materiality of finely handcrafted constructions. Works on view are consistently referential, deferring the notion of singular meaning, to offer a speculative space through which viewers may enter the work.

As a window to enter the works in this show, I conceived and wrote a booklet of questions to open up a dialogue on abstraction with viewers. This format sought to rethink the notion of exhibition text as well as the making of meaning. The exhibition featured a conceptual intersection of ideas and references alluding to codes of culture, language, memory, structures, and space.

Prolonged Hours of Disguised Situations, a solo exhibition of mixed media drawings and paintings by Zakkir Hussain draws on the contemporary experience of exile, the body as a site of power and control, and the growing disconnect between humanity and nature.

Metaphysical Gravity, a solo exhibition of installation, video and kinetic sculpture by Tahireh Lal refers to the invisible forces at work in the embodied experience of trans national migration. Through self-reflexive praxis, Lal contemplates the idea of home in the context of contemporary mobility. Alluding to one of the arguments of the mobilities paradigm i.e., any mobility has its immobile counterpart; she views movement and stasis as mutually coexistent.

Narratives span across traces of romantic relationships in public spaces of Indian cities (Gayatri Ganju), to the disappearance of independent practices such as ‘bonesetters’ on the streets of Mumbai (Niyati Upadhya). Always political, always subjective, the images encourage viewers to revisit spaces of the everyday - both real and imagined.

In order to question the values and beliefs that drive our actions, my dissertation explores ‘failure’ as a valid position to take.