Curiosity - A desire to know, an interest leading to inquiry, the quality of fastidiousness, a rare or strange object…
Four artists discover a world of their curiosities through the insertion or intervention of objects. By subverting the scale of everyday things, each artist attempts to explore a new curiosity- for Shivani Aggarwal, it’s possibly emotions derived from the mundane routine of a householder; for Priti Kahar, it is the looming fear that hinders social normalcy, for Parvathi Nayar it is discovering an alternate reality through an animated activation of her drawings and for Simrin Mehra Agarwal, it is the knotting of organic and mechanized engagements.
Pinned like a location on a map, against stratified lines, Priti Kahar’s ‘pins’ invert the idea of safety, and quite literally narrate the fear in need of being extinguished. The repetition in her imagery echoes an anger emerging from an inability to prove the futility of violence. A similar anxiety drives Shivani Aggarwal’s assemblages of red threads that represent her constant struggle to untangle the expectations and duties of a woman. Her incapacity to fulfill unending domestic roles compels a desire to challenge functions that are long outgrown, all too obvious in the ridiculously oversized kitchen tool titled I can’t hold anything anymore’.
Another set of dislocations marked in the photographed drawings of Parvathi Nayar exploits the element of chance in a contrived world that parallels the one we live in. Nayar cleverly places familiar objects like a chair, or cacti within her drawings, a voyeuristic peek into a surreal and rather enticing dimension, of a scale unknown. The fact that none of the photographs are photoshopped, makes for an even more perplexing outsider to insider view.
Similar shades of grey are addressed anew in Simrin Mehra Agarwal’s, Entangled, an exploration of the natural and man-made, and a questioning of the symbiotic or parasitic confrontations therein. The existential and the temporal are recitations that consume a hybrid form, detailed in each etch of the tree’s bark that stands in combat with the mechanized workings of human innovations.
Mapping a world of curiosities addresses the dichotomy of society and nature, of subject and object. Each work is a mapping of hungered, thwarted and teased objects - a means of indulging our desires and repeating unappeased thoughts. The show is a theatre of abstractions, where each object performs a role on a stage of the artist’s own making and in doing so, reveals the fragility of all worldly relations- of power, gender, animate and inanimate matter.
