The tracings of the hand...

When Rahul first approached me with the concept for this show, I immediately felt excited about it.  Accepting to be part of a show for me is about whether I view the collaboration with the curator and the gallerist as holding a space that engages with dialogues that can thread together common interests, even if with differing perceptions related to these areas of contemplation that we circle to focus upon. 

I love the rough and tumble of discussions on art that throw together passions that come from the raw energies of belief.  Relevant critical  discourse finds its formation often by the process of evaluating  the intentions that come from studio practices; where ideologies and concepts define content, where subject matter  decides the medium, and where visual language is arrived at from a conscious attempt to formulate a cohesive articulation - thereby validating the premises/territory of the individual artist.

The presence of the tracing of the hand with all its imperfections is the element of my own imprint within my work.  The presence of being........in many ways.

Photography was part of my early years of college........extensively used in those initial years and remaining always a language tool crucial to my interests as an artist. However I chose to completely stop using a camera in 1982.  I learnt and shared many things through the arguments  with photographer friends and my numerous visits to photo galleries in New York in the '90's;  and it is here where I made my first departures away from the influences of a genre of photography that I had grown up with : the black and white ethnographic documentary photography. I picked up a professional camera again only in 2010, after a gap of twenty-six years. 

Personal histories of people fascinate me. Flea markets where old photographs of families lie in discarded heaps, hold a haunting space of shared nostalgia for things related to intimacies and loss that are not viewed as significant in the larger schema of hierarchies. My own history defies being comfortably labeled,  and it is such territories within a cultural landscape of India which is increasingly rigid in its desire to neatly label and bracket via survey censuses that prompt me to  engage in these negotiations with my work. 

I am looking forward to this show engaging us in discussions that hold investigations and enquiries that are pertinent to the curatorial peg that this show is hinged on.