Artists: Aditya Chadar, Meenakshi Nihalani, Nalinakshya Talukdar, Naveen Tungana, Riddhi Vasoya, Santanu Debnath, Sonali Sonam, Teja Gavankar, Vipul Badva
The exhibition Views from Within poses several slice-of-life scenarios. A crowded room, filled like a glass to the brim with people who occupy it in busy-bodied repetition. A solemn wedge of nature, with a strewn object or two marking an absent person distracted, perhaps, by a babbling brook nearby. Awkward crevices that converge to form a path between two windows, buildings and their foliage, or the crisscrossing groundwork of a tiled trail. A passing figure, arms akimbo and neatly refined, permeating their surroundings with determined yet unseen clouds of thought. Then the indiscrete elemental collusions of the atmosphere to which one is an awestruck witness. Where you find yourself is quite beside the point because a space, by sensory definition, is an autogenous and paradoxical condition in which constituent elements can both exist and empty. It is also regarded as a unit of time. Space becomes a thing we carry inside us as much as an outward circumstance that’s manifest, over which we exert a mapping of patterns and peculiarities to suit our understanding – of position and disposition. As relational beings, we move through spaces with a weaponry of moods, perceptions and responses that decidedly rival the world as it objectively is in favor of what it feels like to us. If we possessed a guidebook for within, how would it read?