Prophets, Visionaries and Disciples, May 3 - 12, 2024. 1 Shanthi Road Gallery
This exhibition features a select group of Srishti students and faculty, whose work represents an on-going confluence of artistic research and practice.
Whether prophets, visionaries or disciples, they offer us a profound insight into their recent conceptual and formal investigations: They are our advance guard in confronting the world bent out of shape. They are our barometers of the gravity of the current human condition. They discover and describe the hidden elements of destruction and chaos that lies before us. They are prophets of the past and visionaries of the future.
These artists are all disciples of the artistic practices that have been practiced for centuries. Driven by the challenge of how to convey the world in its beauty and ugliness, and as proactive witnesses of our unfolding history, these artists continue the legacy of masters both celebrated and “anonymous." They share their journeys into profound self-knowledge, where visions of our future are distilled.
Notable works include: Shai Heredia’s most recent book, One Film at a Time, 2024, an anthology that traces diverse histories and trajectories of filmmaking in India since the 1960s; Mamtha Sagar’s Song Slaughter installation in the memory of Saketh Rajan who was brutally felled by the police in 2005 for his activist work for labor rights, and Anil Kumar’s drawings titled Those who Preach, Reach Each to whom it does Ache!
Participating artists:
Anan Wadhwana, Anil Kumar, Ananya Vepa, Arya Patil, Bavisha Varigoda, Charvee Thakur, Devaki Pratap, Mamatha Sagar, Ramona Dias, Spriha Das, Shreya Anu Shekar, Utshree Pandey, Spoorthi Rani, Shambhavi, Shai Heredia, Vaibhavi, Vani Parmar, Yajnaseni, and Yashas Shetty.
On view clockwise: Ananya Vepa, Anan Wadhwana and Kush Patel.
Ananya Vepa,
Yajnaseni is a multidisciplinary artist who dives into worlds of fantastical storytelling through illustration, photography, and the written word with mythology, nature, and popular culture being themes she enjoys exploring. Her artistic journey took an entrepreneurial leap three years ago with the launch of her own business, where she empowers others through art education and the mindful practice of journaling. She believes in encouraging artistic interaction and creative thinking, as well as the practice of using one’s hands.
When she's not conjuring new artistic realms, you might find her exploring the underwater world through diving, expressing herself through the language of dance, or simply dreaming up her next adventure.
Devaki Pratap, Untitled
"Untitled" presents the lived experiences of student and teacher bodyminds within the unyielding expectations and environments of a capitalistic educational space. By illustrating a narrative flowchart, I outline the complex and often invisible set of decisions made by a "struggling" student navigating a neurotypical system, indicating that often they are confronted with an illusion of choice regarding their fate within a limiting and exhausting system. This results in negative self-talk that only fuels conformity. The flowchart represents my own lived reality alongside two interviews I conducted with students from differing educational backgrounds. By making an “unwinnable” narrative, I wish to shed light on the importance of problematizing the system instead of the individual, since the student’s choices are shown to be futile and all lead to the same ending. The audio clips from my interview with a high-school English teacher adds another narrative layer, as her story brings out the ways in which facilitators themselves hold unwinnable positions in the institution.
Anil Kumar, Those who Preach, Reach Each to whom it does Ache!
Triptych: width A4 size paper, colour ball point pen drawing on paper, 2024.
I always wanted to believe that the world, for me, is exactly the way I draw it and what I draw from it. To draw is one relevant mode of being alive, though procrastination is it's 'sketch'y state. I hardly let my drawings have a closure, like these four works displayed. When I was a student/disciple, I began to 'draw' a faint imagery of my future: I had 'doodle'd a list of teachers I never wanted to be or become like, as and when I would become a teacher. This is drawing the un'mark'able. I witnessed the popular prophetic teachers and how they drew us away from their secrets. Now, while drawing, I do not want to subject the performative abilities of the lines to be subversive to what does it finally frieze into, as the vision. These visionary mentors had blind spots which became the metaphorically canvases for my future drawings.
Hence I am a disciple of those drawn lines that never made it or can make it onto the paper. The ones I have drawn are only the doppelganger of those absences. As visionaries of futility and absences, the un’mark’able are those that goes unnoticed; & often rightfully so. It is like the way disciples follow prophesies while visionaries are those who are able to release the fate lines of the artistic hand from the imprisonment of the paper. These are all like the empty spaces in and around a drawing, they are vacuous in the way we don’t know. In my drawings herein, visionaries and prophets are evident as (i) skills to render, (ii) visions to compose and (iii) disciplined attitude towards framing that one picture which considers 'representation on a surface' as a colonial humiliation to that very surface! In the meantime, my own prophets and visionaries taught me through their failure, to be humane. As a disciple, I keep drawing the act of unlearning from their humaneness. Drawing drawing out of its anorexia is why I do draw. H.A. Anil Kumar
Anil Kumar, Those who Preach, Reach Each to whom it does Ache!
Triptych: width A4 size paper, colour ball point pen drawing on paper, 2024.
I always wanted to believe that the world, for me, is exactly the way I draw it and what I draw from it. To draw is one relevant mode of being alive, though procrastination is it's 'sketch'y state. I hardly let my drawings have a closure, like these four works displayed. When I was a student/disciple, I began to 'draw' a faint imagery of my future: I had 'doodle'd a list of teachers I never wanted to be or become like, as and when I would become a teacher. This is drawing the un'mark'able. I witnessed the popular prophetic teachers and how they drew us away from their secrets. Now, while drawing, I do not want to subject the performative abilities of the lines to be subversive to what does it finally frieze into, as the vision. These visionary mentors had blind spots which became the metaphorically canvases for my future drawings.
Hence I am a disciple of those drawn lines that never made it or can make it onto the paper. The ones I have drawn are only the doppelganger of those absences. As visionaries of futility and absences, the un’mark’able are those that goes unnoticed; & often rightfully so. It is like the way disciples follow prophesies while visionaries are those who are able to release the fate lines of the artistic hand from the imprisonment of the paper. These are all like the empty spaces in and around a drawing, they are vacuous in the way we don’t know. In my drawings herein, visionaries and prophets are evident as (i) skills to render, (ii) visions to compose and (iii) disciplined attitude towards framing that one picture which considers 'representation on a surface' as a colonial humiliation to that very surface! In the meantime, my own prophets and visionaries taught me through their failure, to be humane. As a disciple, I keep drawing the act of unlearning from their humaneness. Drawing drawing out of its anorexia is why I do draw. H.A. Anil Kumar
Anil Kumar, Those who Preach, Reach Each to whom it does Ache!
Triptych: width A4 size paper, colour ball point pen drawing on paper, 2024.
I always wanted to believe that the world, for me, is exactly the way I draw it and what I draw from it. To draw is one relevant mode of being alive, though procrastination is it's 'sketch'y state. I hardly let my drawings have a closure, like these four works displayed. When I was a student/disciple, I began to 'draw' a faint imagery of my future: I had 'doodle'd a list of teachers I never wanted to be or become like, as and when I would become a teacher. This is drawing the un'mark'able. I witnessed the popular prophetic teachers and how they drew us away from their secrets. Now, while drawing, I do not want to subject the performative abilities of the lines to be subversive to what does it finally frieze into, as the vision. These visionary mentors had blind spots which became the metaphorically canvases for my future drawings.
Hence I am a disciple of those drawn lines that never made it or can make it onto the paper. The ones I have drawn are only the doppelganger of those absences. As visionaries of futility and absences, the un’mark’able are those that goes unnoticed; & often rightfully so. It is like the way disciples follow prophesies while visionaries are those who are able to release the fate lines of the artistic hand from the imprisonment of the paper. These are all like the empty spaces in and around a drawing, they are vacuous in the way we don’t know. In my drawings herein, visionaries and prophets are evident as (i) skills to render, (ii) visions to compose and (iii) disciplined attitude towards framing that one picture which considers 'representation on a surface' as a colonial humiliation to that very surface! In the meantime, my own prophets and visionaries taught me through their failure, to be humane. As a disciple, I keep drawing the act of unlearning from their humaneness. Drawing drawing out of its anorexia is why I do draw. H.A. Anil Kumar