The ‘Final Display 2022’ in the Department of Fine Arts, Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication at the University of Hyderabad was on view from 4th to 6th June this year. The thirty-four graduating participants represent a threshold between their present artworks and prospective artistic practices. The corporeal and conceptual juxtaposition of creative practices frames the Fine Art Department’s broader interest in cross-pollination across the disciplines, inquisitiveness, and empirical knowledge. Across multiple practicing platforms, these outgoing cohorts engage the broader community in conversations about the future of their art practices in a built environment. After the covid-academic year, when we shuttled between the virtual, physical, and quarantined spaces, the final display this year was a testing ground for the art laboratories that play a crucial role in shaping the future of our outgoing artists. In light of post-pandemic conditions, they displayed what disappeared from our shared and fragile histories.

Absence as impression

Tushant Vishwakarma hung a broken tree branch and sets of cyanotypes and drawings to depict the hidden terrors associated with the depleting natural environment, which is vague in the happenings around us. On the other hand, Erukali Banuprakash observes the transformation of nature by printing veins and the intricate texture of the leaves. Anandu Premil’s watercolor on cloth “Man with hope” depicts a sixteen-foot-long ‘varal’ (catfish) hanging from the ceiling. Its spectacular presence in the exhibition hall was a way to conceal the hunger and poverty of his family, leading them to secretly catch ‘varal’ fish from the wetland. 

Deepak Kumar Mandal’s installation with photographs, the forms of a tent, and rotis is a depiction of excess and dearth of food, representing the pattern of people’s eating habits in a social tier. Susmita Yadav quilts the stories of the secret mundane life of women under ghunghats, in their concealed spaces, with whom she grew up. She indulges herself to recreate their tattles through drawings, sewing, and printing. Anshuka Mahapatra addresses the complexity and anxieties of the alienation hidden beneath the allure of modern living, through her video installation projected on cloth bags containing signs warning viewers to not enter the digital world. Kiran Mohanty’s drawings and stitching camouflage human cohabitation with stray animals through patterns and designs. The secret relationship between humans and animals is the subject of Viswathi Palakkakuzhi’s work. Deriving her visual language from Mughal miniatures and American minimalism of the 1960s, her images are an impression of the lost wetland of Malappuram in Kerala.

A black cloth gate takes you to a secret room, where Ananya Ashok opens up her transmuted personal poetic experience associated with the pandemic. Nandita Basak deals with cultural fetishes using emojis and other social media tools of communication. She blurs the line between herself and other women of her culture to depict their common and lived experience—this connectedness manifests in the visual language of her work. Kaustav Chatterjee speaks to everything which appears and disappears as an actor in the conversational play of his artworks. The living and non-living elements are his families; they arrive and depart in the forms of portraits, drawings, photographs, witty poems, and confrontational statements. His ideas of having, losing, and changing places are like adding and missing pages from his notebooks.

Trishla Jain creates a pictorial architectural surface where she can freely express herself, and can keep her years-long tussle with words and anxiety of her dyslexia at bay. She explores different literary devices to understand the ambiguity of texts. The texts are the tools she uses to add, remove, and manipulate those in the pictorial surface to experience a feeling of liberation in her artistic exploration and thought process. The resonance of the disappearing elements from the lives of both humans and non-humans deeply moved these artists; they experimented with the presence of the erasure of lives as impressions in their creative processes.

Archaeology of the dimension     

Deeptesh Karmakar’s unbaked clay sculptures appear at foot level, making the viewers feel like Jonathan Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver: a giant in a landscape of miniscule architecture. His sculptural forms of the architectural walls puzzle the viewers, raising questions about the stability of human settlement and its remains.

Praveen Prasanan’s wheel made of earthenware produces sounds when rotated, because of the presence of hidden pebbles inside the vessels. He hides the source of the sounds in his sculptural installation to enhance his critique of the elected representatives in civil society. Dheeraj Kumar observes the border between our tangible and intangible living spaces inside us. His calligraphic script with barbed wires exhibited on the courtyard terrace keeping the sky as a backdrop is a metaphor for hopes on our social wiry habitus. Sudheesh Velayudhan’s kinetic sculptures with human vertebrae columns, ribs, legs, and tongues reflect his satire and sarcasm towards our society. 

Sukumar Garain arranged bricks like an archaeological excavation with buried objects and evoked a sense of absence and remains. Vamsi Krishna’s sculptural mask images represent entanglement in familial relations and the resultant revelations. Ramheube Riame’s sculptural installation looks natural; he recreates objects that migrant labourers usually carry in their bags, and places them in a convincing setup. His installation, titled ‘ballad of the dislocated,’ compels us to think through the archaeology of the migrants’ belongings. Bivas Paul’s artworks deal with the mummification of objects, space, and time. The animated appearance of the things in his surroundings activates his sensorial artistic connection with them. He collects, molds, copies, casts, and draws the objects to give them another life.

Silence is Swarnendu Chakraborty’s statement. His makeshift shelters and homes on graph papers and flex prints appear and disappear, suggesting shifts and drifts in the landscape and its changing vanishing point. Sunitha Revuri’s works explore the mysticism and otherness of ‘being’. The mediums in her works attempt to translate the transience of life and death. The mutation of the material in her results suggests an expression of separation, loss, and healing. Harshita Chauhan’s practice is an archaeological account of humans on earth. Fragments and broken links are the strength of her creative works. She asserts that her images bear the footprints of the past and are an artistically registered account of many historical chronicles. Nirmala Pai draws our focus to the materiality of the human body as a fluid artistic practices. Her artworks are like an album of memories. She uses watercolor, photographs, drawings, and videos as the representational medium to depict the paradox of human existence. Intersecting dimensions as a form of the material, images, and process play a pivotal role for these artists. They delve deeply into the materials deeper to give conceptual dimensions a corporeal form.

Foreshortening of many illusions

Delhi, Deepti Gaur’s hometown, is her sonic archive which Gaur explores with her traveling chronicles and mixed media. Her practices emerge from the free-flowing ideas of lines enmeshed with aural expression- where sound, sight, and site keep exchanging places. Memories and untimely separation due to covid put Rupali Goel in the fragments of dystopic thoughts. She writes, “I am not painting a picture; I am creating a chapter in the story….”  The concept of ‘transition’ is at the center of her artistic endeavor. She creates painterly layered surfaces where void meets with the objects of memory. The pattern in Sneha Patel’s pictorial surface moves and melts without notifying the viewers. It adds to her critique of us constantly rushing and chasing different tasks without appraising the idea of rootedness and belonging. The wabi-sabi philosophy of accepting transience and imperfection forms her a creative framework. Patel’s works depict the subtle nuances of her sensorial experiences as evidence of presence.

Drawing from the Kannada novel Marali Mannige (Back to the Soil, 1941), Harish Gauribidanur’s performative practices explore multiple possibilities of materials such as jaggery through dark satire. His image-making is embedded in poetry, cinema, advertisements, and ordinary happenings with a tint of humor. It responds to the toils and turmoil of life but never loses sight of the beauty of mundane inheritance. Who says that artists are always serious? Kota Raj Surendra is an ardent film lover. Surendra juxtaposes the visuals of the reel with reality and exaggerates them to intensify the narratives. The pop method of making memes reverberates in his works. Surendra pictorially recontextualizes the idea of  exaggerated relation by superimposing and collaging pictorial frames. 

Sasikanth Vishnumudi is an artist-agriculturist. His twenty-five-meter canvas is vast, where he traces the lives of trees in constant flux. For him, the texture of tree bark and aging human skin is the imprint of a greying farmland. In his view, tilling soil in his farmland is just like drawing on earth, and drawing trees on canvas is a way of growing trees on the planet of self. Ananthakrishnan Suresh’s artworks are about his homeland, Alappuzha, distinctively recognised for its water bodies and farming fields. He has grown up with the visuals and mystic characters of Alappuzha, collective myths, and folklores associated with the human skeletons, which frequently emerge in his drawings and paintings. His artistic practice heavily draws from farmers’ issues, land, and the climate in Alappuzha. Sourav Haldar explores the dichotomy between ideas of scientific accuracy in knowledge production and the uncertainties of the world. His landscape gives an elusive understanding of rapidly transforming surroundings. His curiosity in scientific measuring becomes a creative tool in his work—Halder layers infographics and laboratory interpretation with lived experiences.

Light has trapped many painters for centuries and has also hypnotised Gayathri Prasad. Light appears as the foremost pictorial element in Prasad’s paintings. She finds making intense light out of pigments to be a healing process. Yash Verma’s paintings are the vibration from his deaf world that he narrates by painting portraits like those present in family albums. His eclectic painterly languages with rough and cluttered brushstrokes, patches of hues, and hatching lines reflect his journey with the pages of a modern art history book, and act as a means of finding a quiet way of locating himself in the world. Interestingly, along with the works, these artists also displayed a distance that was not invisible, and the viewers realized it while seeing the pieces. They measured the distance to foreshorten the viewer’s position. The viewers unknowingly adjusted their standing positions and gestures to understand the deceptive imagery, materials, and processes.

Once we completed the exhibition, we discovered that the display was the fragments of many bodies, identities, and dislocations, which the artists put together to reconcile with the erased, broken, and lost ones. Thus, the thirty-four graduating friends created a labyrinth of their art practices that involve various bodies and territories. They have collectively shared experiences, memories, and identities, interconnecting narratives of the surreal and chaotic histories and human consciousness. Nevertheless, the exhibition’s most viewed and un-viewed element was the emotional entanglement in between work, space, studio practice, and the process of making and unmaking the display. It looks as if they have met in the department the way travelers met at the castle of Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1997), where spreading and reading the tarots of their diverse artistic practices was the only way to hide the absence of a common language.