Art Alive Gallery begins its season with an exhibition ‘Turn the Tables’, bringing together six young contemporary artists. The exhibition charts the territory of these artists to see how their practices evolve at a turning point in their artistic career in juxtaposition that inevitably draws similarities and differences in their meanings and methods.
The exhibition features the works of Jignasha Ojha, Kartik Sood, Vipul Prajapathi, Uma Shankar Pathak, Meghansh Thapa and Sonam Jain cut across a variety of themes and issues that concern contemporary Indian citizen in the interstices of urban-rural, modernity-tradition dualities.
Meghansh Thapa’s charcoal drawings on canvas employ the trope of group portrait as that of anonymous people engrossed in grim urban dystopia. Sonam Jain capitalizes upon revolutionary potential of the playing card design scheme. Vipul Prajapati although sticking to the medium of painting in oil colours scavenges upon the debris of digital photography and photographic realism through image transfers that carry the trace of digital darkroom effects.
Uma Shankar Pathak’s also evoke the anxiety regarding the city, but not quite in the way, softly rendered in transparent water colour washes, as in a straight forward imaging technique. Jignasha Ojha’s paintings are layered with multiple temporalities. This synchronicity is marked with symbols of contemporaneity interacting with elements of an Indian medieval past. And Kartik Sood makes use of the possibilities of multimedia installations, like back-lit black and white portraits, black and white video footages on television sets, as if delving into the subliminal, scratching the surface of memory.
