Getting a platform to showcase your art right after you step out of college is every young artist's dream. Khoj International Artists’ Association provides just this mentorship through its annual Peers residency that provides recent graduates and masters students from various art and design institutes across the country an opportunity for exchange and dialogue.
Peers 2015 that was held recently at Khoj Studios in New Delhi showcased art created by five young artists including Digbijayee Khatua, Faiza Hasan, Mithun Das, Shailesh BR and Utsa Hazarika.
Khatua had used burnt matchsticks and paper for his installation work. He says, “Burnt matchsticks serve as a metaphor for the combustible city and its colossal constructs. My work depicts the contrast and diversity between rural and urban life.” Among his work one also finds photographs of urban symbols like flyovers and streetlights.
Hasan's work is created like a book in progress -- with pages, leaflets and various sections. Her project borrows largely from medical illustrations of the 18th Century, as well as those that came later, particularly those that illustrate the different aspects of the science of optometry. She says, “Among the other ideas that are also explored in the pages of this book are those of scrutiny and censorship that arise from my own discomfort with the possible unauthorized and unlimited access, and the prying into my personal data by third parties and its possible misuse.”
Das' works celebrate the uncanny. The motifs which constantly recur in his imagery speak of desires as well as of unknown fears. “I constantly jostle with myself to express my emotions through numerous marks on the surface. These marks not only decipher the tale of pleasure and pain but also hint at dreams and nightmares. Death is probably the harshest reality of life. I have access to a public hospital in Kolkata, where death, mutilations, morbid infections and grotesque afflictions of the human body are everyday reality. My figures, neither dead nor alive, constantly evolve from one form to the other, much like an unidentified metamorphosing creature.”
Shailesh references his work from the frequent tremors experienced in Delhi. Connecting his work with the mythological story of Vishnu's Varaha avatar, he imagines the ensuing turbulence then as the lifting of the earth by the Varaha avatar on its tusks. His work involves a series of drawings with text and several interactive sculptures built like simple machines that express his ideas about an earthquake rather playfully.
Hazarika plays with static objects as well as the moving image through a video. The use of reflective surfaces like broken mirrors and earthen pots add a new dimension to her art material.
(Poonam Goel is a freelance journalist who contributes articles on visual arts for unboxedwriters.com)