Three artists, Silpi Rajan, Midhun Mohan, and Mohammed A, come together in this show, a congregation of images and conversations across media. Coming from different disciplines and using diverse methodologies and materialities, they create a unique confluence of different modes of aesthetic expression: photography, sculpture, and painting, as well as different instincts: archival, physical, and imaginary.
These images emanate from different force fields and states of being-in-the-world; history, art, and mythology intersect, while the states of jagrat (wakefulness), swapna (dreams), and sushupti (deep sleep) enfold and unfold. Terrestrial roots come into view, dreams erupt into visceral images, and imaginations become physical and figural. Excavated, chiselled, and imagined, these images journey from prehistory to history and beyond.
Death has its own metaphors. Death is not an end or closure here, but something that lingers over everything, as a beyond, a passage, a space in between, or another mode of being. Here, the past offers itself to amphibious futures, where hitherto binaries merge and intersect, dreams convey facts, figures embody spirit, and journeys deepen stasis.
Three artists, three mediums, three worlds, three modes of imagination. Their images meet and converse here: one of Silpi's figures could have arisen from the sites in Mohammed's photos and cut loose in the dark ocean of Mithun's painting. While Mohammed's photographs from excavation sites dig into the earth to reveal layers of our past, Silpi's works rise from the earth as children of the soil, in both the literal and metaphorical sense. Mithun Mohan's works traverse the in-between spaces and endless journeys, forced, voluntary, and spiritual. Terrest'real' in many ways; these images are all deeply earthy yet enigmatic, as they confront us like apparitions from a time past or yet to be. Touched by the beyond, a certain haze of unreality, impermanence, and magic envelops them.
This show extends the idea of amphibian aesthetics, not only by provoking new conversations between mediums, materialities, visions, memories, and spiritualities, but also by disturbing the white cube monotony and probing new ways in contemporary aesthetics and curatorial practices.
