Exhibiting Artists: Jagannath Panda, K.M. Madhusudhanan, N.S. Harsha, Sudhir Patwardhan, Praneet Soi, Gigi Scaria, Sujith S.N., Susanta Mandal, Pranati Panda, Sachin George Sebastian, Shailesh B.R., Biraaj Dodiya, Shrimanti Saha, Priyanka Choudhary
In the poem 'One Art' by American poetess Elizabeth Bishop, she writes:
The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
To articulate loss as intent is a cognitive treat, because as intellectual beings we're geared to discover or impose the meanings we're determined to find. In culture and community, as groups we tend to strive for pure definitions and generic completion to tame the seemingly random chaos of our existences. Our deepest desire may be to wholly tether ourselves to existence, but we remain keen to experience life through our thoughts and feelings. Yet we struggle to fathom wholeness, in terms of identity, time, place, memory and being, and so we develop symbolic vocabularies to represent our questions. In asking these questions, what if we were to embrace the disorientation as we speculate the world in and around us, and frolic in such distortions?
To win some is to lose some, they say. To challenge ourselves is to consider alterity, the possibilities pregnant in what is seen but also not seen, and likewise not heard, or tasted, or touched in usual modalities of recognition. Would losing some of our beliefs - that can tend to be rebellious and impure - about the way things are or should be grant us something greater by way of the imagination? As we search for possibility instead of answers, let us ask: is truth multiple? Does reality exist as is or only as perceived realness? And what of experiences modelled after who and how we ourselves are?
With thoughtful curatorial intervention, A Handful of Dust is a conceptual exhibition that brings together a suite of works across media and techniques, including drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, and machines, to explore concepts of ecological regeneration, human progress, family history, urban systems, physical objects, personal memory, the human body, philosophical schools, and even sleep as indeterminable, heterogenous and disfigured knowledge bodies, grasped through self-encounter rather than broad conditioning.
