print May 2019

Simryn Gill

Simryn Gill’s recent exhibition “Soft Tissue” continued the artist’s long-standing meditation on habitation, belonging, and undesired elements. The detritus used to create the three works in the show—run-over snakes, the insides of fruits, and weeds—acted as metaphors for our relationship to land, movement, and migration.

“Naga Doodles,” 2017, is a group of seventy-six unique, unframed, ink-on-paper relief prints made from the carcasses of snakes. At Jhaveri Contemporary, the artist presented a selection of twenty-seven of these works of various dimensions (the largest being more than ten feet

print March 2019

Rohini Devasher

Rohini Devasher, whose practice is rooted in evolutionary biology, embraces the speculative by making familiar things strange and exploring the possibilities that emerge from that. The speculative, she says, “allows many visions of the future, not bound by any form of linear progression.” The hybrid beings in her works blur the distinctions between natural and unnatural. At Devasher’s recent exhibition “Hopeful Monsters,” a strange landscape seemed to be forcing its way into the gallery through a breach in one of its walls. At once hypnotic and menacing, the site-specific wall work Genetic Drift:

picks January 18, 2019

Rakhi Peswani

Rakhi Peswani’s “Conditions of Infirmity” was developed over the last eighteen months, during which her mother passed away after prolonged chemotherapy and the artist’s dog was also life-threateningly ill. Informed by this tremendous loss, the works in the show invite us to reflect on how disease relates to our “unhinged interventions in nature’s rhythms and processes.” Peswani has brought together forms and processes including sewing, painting, drawing, text, print, collage, sculpture, and assemblage with scavenged or found objects.

Material itself becomes the subject in the textile works, which

print January 2019

Yardena Kurulkar

“The Terror of Death,” the second chapter in Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Denial of Death (1973), opens with Sigmund Freud’s question “Would it not be better to give death the place in actuality and in our thoughts which properly belongs to it, and to yield a little more prominence to that unconscious attitude towards death which we have hitherto so carefully suppressed?” Both Freud’s quote and Becker’s book argue for a revision of our cultural beliefs about the end of life. While Freud asks us to “reform and give truth its due,” Becker adds that the fear of death is one “from

print April 2018

Gyan Panchal

In Arun Kolatkar’s poem “Meera,” from his collection Kala Ghoda Poems (2004), a street sweeper puts modest piles of trash on display along the curb in front of the Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay (now Mumbai). These “installations,” Kolatkar writes, “might as well have been / titled ‘Homage to Bombay, one,’ / ‘Homage to Bombay, two,’ and so on, / since a good bit of the city stands / on sweepings such as these.” The latter bit is a reference to the land reclaimed from the sea for the purpose of filling in marshes and inlets with rubble and refuse, linking what were once seven islands into a single

print March 2018

L. N. Tallur

Ancient and contemporary, traditional and modern conflate in L. N. Tallur’s sculptures, making them historically ambiguous, unbounded by time. Trained in museology, Tallur seems to be particularly concerned with issues of age, provenance, and authenticity as well as with the museum as a site of cultural and evolutionary taxonomy and with its inherent politics of representation.

In his essay “On the Annals of the Laboratory State” (1988), sociologist Shiv Visvanathan talks about how the time of modernity became the time of the world. In it, he describes how the cyclical theory of time of the

print December 2017

Minam Apang

Ideas of fragility and impermanence ran through the charcoal drawings on cloth and paper in Minam Apang’s recent exhibition, “Drawing Phantoms.” The works on cloth appeared to be landscapes—a turbulent sea; a sky crowded with moons, shrouded in mist; mountains in the distance, only faintly visible. Charcoal’s material characteristics lend themselves perfectly to represent these seemingly ephemeral perceptions. The medium’s easy transformability and monochromy create ambiguous figures; Apang’s hybrid images are not what they seem. The Goa, India–based artist says the works try to embody

print November 2017

Aji V.N.

In his 2014 essay “For a Phytocentrism to Come,” philosopher Michael Marder argues, “In a fight against the nefarious legacy of anthropocentrism, the advantage of phytocentrism over the alternatives is in how it interferes with the all-absorbing projection of the anthropos onto the horizons of the world.” Could Aji V.N.’s recent paintings of trees and verdant landscapes be understood as an attempt to upend what Marder calls “the inflation of the human as the measure and standard for other forms of existence?” In the works in his latest solo show, trees were no longer the inconspicuous, marginalized

Roshan Kumar Mogali