Kerala born Gigi Scaria, 45, returns to the city where he earned his master’s degree from Jamia Millia Islamia with a solo exhibition titled Ecce Homo: Behold the man or how one become what one is, which displays a body of new works by Scaria including paintings, sculpture and projection. Scaria has been dubbed as the Urban Chronicler of India by Premjish Achari in his long essay, Man, In the End Times.
Impressed with his body work, Achari writes in his monumental essay, “Scaria’s works betray the nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche. This body of work draws exhaustively on Nietzsche’s seminal text Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are.
Like Nietzsche, Scaria too charts out an iconoclastic path, he dismantles the existing value systems to offer us a bleak vision of the present and the future.
His works postulate that the prophecies of doom have become the songs of the sirens in our time, enticing and irresistible, but ultimately fatal.
By foregrounding the human body and its contemporary experience, Scaria develops an artistic elegy for the time and human body. In his worldview the human body is a slave to an apparatus of production and consumption, doomed to fulfil its desires but remain eternally ravenous,” notes Achari in his monumental essay.
Elucidating the idea further, Scaria, says, “For this show, I have extended Nietzsche’s idea and show the consequences a man could suffer in order to become superhuman after the Nietzschean model. I place my works under his preferred theme of the urban life and its effect on humans,” adding, “I look at socio-political conditions in an urban context and offer a mix of serious and playful metaphors through my art.”
The most notable among the ones on display include bronze installations - Ringa Ringa Roses, Hesitant, and Power Test. Till November 24, at the Vadehra Art Gallery. The author writes on entertainment and food among other things.