On view will be four solo projects by four artists: Rathin Barman, Adip Dutta, Sanchayan Ghosh & Prabhakar Pachpute
The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms.Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon, which no man has, but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of all these men's farms, yet to this, their land-deeds give them no title. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature" (1836)
The contention of owning a resource, to lay claim to it, whether it be tangible land or intangible knowledge emerges to be the nature of modern development. Land of No Horizon explores ideas of ownership, of development and possibly that of accumulation and misbalances through four distinct solo projects by Rathin Barman, Adip Dutta, Sanchayan Ghosh & Prabhakar Pachpute.
Rathin Barman (b. 1981) works with mediums of change and symbols of consumption. Rust transfer drawings on paper of architectural forms, cast concrete wall panels, and oversized contemporary furniture stuffed with found construction rubble all seem to hint at an urban sprawl in an insurmountable need to outgrow itself but at the same time staring at a sense of instability, barrenness and apparent degeneration.
Adip Dutta (b.1970) creates a series of drawings and sculptures that are essentially tools of construction, some of them obsolete, a few transformed but all made to look like objects placed within an anthropological museum. The questioning of positions, the hierarchy of viewing and the politics of classification are long-standing areas of inquiry in Dutta's practice, and he views these banal construction objects as desirable but ultimately worthless by creating them with materials that completely contradict their originally intended purposes.
Sanchayan Ghosh (b. 1970) will create an installation in the basement of the gallery, transforming it into a dark immersive environment with recorded sounds, videos, and light s, commenting on the rapidly changing landscape of rural India. Drawing from maps of the hinterland, of marginalized landscapes and of notes and observations, Ghosh subtly explores the use of land, the several underlying cross currents that confront a developing economy where ownership of resources becomes frictional.
Prabhakar Pachpute (b. 1986) will present his project, entitled Social Fabric, using charcoal on paper and cloth. The artist recounts the journey of the now unemployed mill workers of Bombay, who were forced to sell agriculture lands and migrate to the city, only then to confront the Great Bombay Textile Strike of 1982. The work, an ongoing engagement of Pachpute's interest with land use, the ethics of labor and the politics of exploitation, comments on his own origins of being born into a family of coal mine workers and the effects of illusionary development of the village and the land he grew up on. Social Fabric was commissioned by ifa-Galerie Stuttgart & Berlin for the exhibition Social Fabric, curated by Grant Watson, Iniva. Pachpute was advised by curators Zasha Colah & Sumesh Sharma from the Clark House Initiative, Bombay for the exhibition.