Unveiled Horizons

As dwellers of the concrete jungle, our field of perception is inundated with capitalist aspirations
and technological promises that shape our being. These realities create a longing to break out of the matrixes we are embedded in, in an attempt to create otherworlds, once imaginary and desirous, where instinct, feeling and agency play pivotal roles. As the matrix is sutured, its parts bent at will, angularities re-arranged, some fragments let gone
off and some molten and poured to be moulded
anew, diverse aspects enter a dialogue at the edge. Here, the frayed edge reflects the frictional
negotiations of an urban dweller’s wants and needs, becoming a point where logic and instinct, past and present, the organic and the synthetic, the given and the imagined meet to generate new realities, guided by tendencies that are subjective, preservative, cynical and emancipatory.

Dwelling at such meeting points, rife with
contradictions and possibilities, Unveiled Horizons brings together works by Aparajita Jain Mahajan, Durgesh Kumar, Gauri Gandhi, Harman Taneja, Harpreet Singh, Priti Vadakkath and Richi Bhatia. Their approaches—in media ranging from paintings to photographic documentation, ceramics to assemblages, reliefs to scientific photography—
lean more towards a reflective understanding of the word ‘unveiled,’ than its usual gesture of revealing. Secondly, it is each artist’s mode of mapping their realities—and how they interpret the organic—that runs like a common thread between the works, executed in diverse visual languages.

Intent on exploring common evolutionary patterns that exist between the microscopic, the cellular, the macroscopic and the astronomical, minuscule
cross marks within Durgesh’s works point to how electron microscopes and giant radio telescopes
map the body, both inside-out. While these angular
crosses float in his abstract mappings, marking a shifting location, angular forms within Harman’s works are almost non-present, like a troublesome itch that has been let gone off for good.

In Harman’s work, an industrial material like resin takes shape as curvilinear, amorphous forms, guided by the act of pouring and the inability to contain the medium logically. While the work points to her
former training as an architect, where the tendency is to let perpendiculars dictated the worldview, the rigidity that her work eschews, marks an attempt at negotiating with familiar and social norms that shape one’s behaviour.

Harrowed by how social violence in today’s everyday life is marked upon an individual’s bod — that doubles as a temperamental portrait of the cityscape—Gauri’s ceramic pieces map these
scarred embodiments. Her works assume masklike forms that reflect upon aspects of familiarity .