Participating artists: Ashis Dhali, Ashis Kumar Palei, Bhikari Pradhan, Kiran Mungekar, Partha Banik, Rahee Punyashloka, Richa Arya, Ritika Sharma, Soumava Das, Vipin Dhanurdharan with Untitled Kitchen
This exhibition is presented as a field co-constituted through relationality as a vital principle for worlding—to consider what it means to think in relation with one another and come together in active inquiry. It reads this field as continually incipient, active with tendencies and agitations. One that holds the potential for different affective coordinates for perception and experience to come into being. It is interested in temporary ruptures, interruptions, punctuations, and ephemeral ripples that stretch and inflect the fabric of experience, allowing for leakages, accumulations, and intensities to generate new resonances for articulation.
Guided by Erin Manning’s notion of the minor gesture, the exhibition wishes to consider the different ways in which practices hold themselves in movement, mapping the shifts of its internal rhythms and inclinations, tuning into the forces that sit within the interstices of its many possibilities—gently orienting us towards probable conditions for encounters with the ineffable, the more-than, and that which is felt before it is known. For Manning, it is the indeterminacy and speculative potential of the minor gesture that generates an opening for difference to be articulated. She writes, “The event and the minor gesture are always in co-composition, the minor gesture punctuating the process, moving the welling event in new and divergent directions that alter the orientation of where the event might otherwise have settled 1 ."
Bringing together a year-long process of inquiries, the exhibition presents us with an opportunity to think through explorations that probe various modes of participation and co-making. The practices sit with refusals and insurgent desires; they contend with the act of inheritance—negotiating different modes of carrying stories and histories forward; they parse through different methodologies and processes of dialogue and research, in their engagements with archives, political histories, and pedagogy. They perform excavatory acts, staging sites for the speculatory. Scraps, residue, fragments, memory and facsimiles are constructed and reconstructed to propose multiple relationalities.
- Sohorpem Kazingmei
1. Manning, Erin. The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press Durham and London, 2016