Artist Sudarshan Shetty's current exhibition is a mash of film, sculptural installation and photographic images, elaborates Farah Siddique
Mumbai-based artist Sudershan Shetty, recently appointed the Artistic Director and Curator of the 2016 edition of the Kochi Muziris Bienniale, is best known for his sculptural installations. He experiments with numerous materials and often with objects juxtaposed in an attempt to open up new meanings and possibilities. Shetty's most iconic works dispense multiple thoughts. The ideas of being elsewhere, philosophical absence and a constant effort to shift connotations have been key components of his oeuvre.
Whether it was the life-size horse shown tipping over a black canoe from his first solo, Paper Moon in 1995 or the cast iron bathtub with scissors attached to a mechanical device from his exhibition, Consanguinity in 2003 or the life-size dinosaur and jaguar from the show titled Love in 2006 in Mumbai, or the video of the Taj Mahal melting, Shetty's works have been acutely intense and esoteric while manifesting a remarkable restrained fragility in his art.
Born in 1961, Shetty's works have attracted the attention of heavyweight contemporary collectors worldwide and can often be seen at several important exhibitions, museums and art fairs across the world. Shetty's language of extremes deconstructs objects into bizarre situational schemes, denoting their mechanical cores. Exploring new media and materials, the artist trail blazes the path of history, memory and desire, underscoring an eclectic post-modernist vocabulary. Music, poetry, literature, cinema, the city of Mumbai and his own experiences have all been inspirations to Shetty's two decades of art making practice.
Sudarshan Shetty's latest solo exhibition titled Shoonya Ghar (Empty is This House) opened earlier this week at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi. Speaking while installing the exhibition, the artist explained, "the exhibit comprises of an entirely new body of work in various media – film, sculptural installation and photographic images, although in it's essence, it is one work. Envisaged over three years ago, the project was a large scale production that took over 18 months to complete."
The project includes a film that depicts building and construction alongside characters enacting scenes in which drama mobilises conventions of representing birth, death, dance, play, music and violence, in local traditions of story-telling.
New York-based anthropologist and writer Vyjayanthi Rao, who has been closely following Shetty's work over the years, remarks, "The work draws on a poetic work by 12th century poet Gorakhnath, who also influenced his celebrated successor Kabir. These poetic traditions populated their verses with the concrete symbolism of the built world and things within it, with references to nature and the environment as metaphors for the body and its beyond." "The film's conceptual form opens the possibility that these elements can be taken apart and placed in opposition to each other to discover a relation between what is real and what is imagined."
A project at the 20th Bienniale of Sydney from March – June 2016, directed by internationally acclaimed curator Stephanie Rosenthal and the research and execution for the December Kochi Muziris Bienniale will be keeping the artist's year eventful.
Shoonya Ghar (Empty is This House) is showing at NGMA, New Delhi
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
 "Shoonya")
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
)
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
)
)
)
)
)
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}