Radhika Agarwala, just returned from Dubai Art Fair, considers observation and personal experience to be a conceptual practice that underwrites her visual art while channeling a legacy of radical environmental commentaries into the practices of her work. Taking nature and its elements, her pieces comprise multiple components, taking the form of sculptural as well as serial arrangements that we could compare to nature’s chords in the melody of the existence of trees all over the world. She echoes the beauty of Hermann Hesse when he said: ‘Trees are penetrating preachers. Trees are sanctuaries.’ In this deeply reflective sojourn we experience the social and physical dynamics of perception as we encounter her works.

 

 

Scarred earth from the destruction caused by cyclone Amphan in Kolkata has been captured by Agarwala in the work ‘ Tectonic Shifts,’ et al. Gashes in the ground – studies and impressions of soil tracking enables an unseen tracing of displacement and loss. Colours of the patina evoke memories of the past foliage, now lost to time. Her sculptures attempt to capture co-evolution and mutation encountered within her inhabited urban ecologies. In this trio of tree specimens,  she mirrors the past to create a corollary with an ecological echo.

Radhika elucidates: “Studying these tree specimens , I let them dry in my studio for almost one and half years , removing all its toxins and wires coiled up through the barks , preparing them to be alive again. I created molds of various states of its degeneration. The decay of my moulds not only reflects the destruction of the natural ecosystem but also the cracks and the deterioration of our human body and condition.”

 

If Shifting Tectonics is one chapter another is a cluster of 35 (3 x 2 inch) works – patina on brass, which reflects improvisations and plaintive studies of soil. Radhika creates multiple patinas, in colours of the earth (brown, black, green and blue, etc) representing our oceans, forests, soil, et al.

 

Installed in organic representations, Radhika’s work is born of the belief that humanity can only defeat the fracturing experience of modernity - only feel whole again - if it harnesses the potential of knowing about the impact on earth elements from nature. As an artist  through specialization and experimentation, her works find the means to answer humanity's needs. In her commentary, the external space has become something foreign and hostile, so all we have in our internal reality is a space of safety and protection set between very specific limits, anything outside deconstructed, broken in pieces.

 

 

Radhika’s monumental work contemplates humanity's relationship to the natural world with visual wonderment.

 

Untangling the Debris as it flies away , is a series in urban ecologies,  where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of her own  imagination in which transformation and decadence are constant forces of change. We see a classic commentary where trans disciplinary work presents us with tools of thought, and explores the presuppositions of science and everyday life.

 

It is a world where everything  can change, be transformed, become something  else; almost like a world that has lost with the pressures of human living , an eternal object of fascination and desire, yet also a stencil  of startling power and mystery, always fleeing the strictures of a fixed, coherent identity.

 

In this time of uncertainty and mixed feelings, her new body of work grapples with and negotiates our splintered culture, the strikingly frequent intersection of our aspirations and our anxieties. Continuing her uncannily prescient, presciently uncanny exploration of the ways in which images saturate, inform, transform, liberate, and implicate. Dense, occasionally impenetrable, evocative, residual tree forms play with the distances implicit in images of nature’s decadence and detritus. We feel like we know them because their images are so much around us, and yet we do not - and cannot - know them precisely because they are all images. 

 

Radhika’s oeuvre is a visual vernacular that emerges from a thoughtful, deliberately in-depth engagement. Conceived like time capsules, it provides additional tools of investigation and introspection, weaving a web of references and echoes that link the past and the present. 

 

 

Radhika’s approach is wide-ranging, a trans historical approach that traces kinships and affinities between artistic methods and practices, to create new layers of meaning to bridge the present and past. What emerges is a historical narrative that is built around forms of symbiosis, solidarity, and human hood.The largest work in this suite untangling the Debris as it flies away I transcends the graph of time.

 

We are introduced to post human ecologies spanning nature’s moods. The devolved and dispersed character of human agency and moral responsibility in the contemporary condition appears linked with the deepening global trauma of ‘in-humanism’ as a paradox of the Anthropocene for Radhika. Reclaiming human agency and accountability is crucial and critical for collective resistance to the unprecedented state of environmental and social collapse resulting from the inhumanity of contemporary capitalist geopolitics. Understanding the potential for such resistance in the post-human condition requires urgent new thinking about the nature of human influence in complex interactional systems, and about the nature of such systems when conceived in a non-anthropocentric way. Each work in this suite unravels like a time capsule frozen in the leitmotif of Memory Leaves.

 

Many of the stories told in Radhika’s time capsules thus participate in the complex process of rewriting and rereading ecological history that has marked the last few months, when it has become clearer than ever that no historical narrative can ever be considered final.

 

Photographer Rid Burman’s interest in qualities of space, time, and light have endured throughout his career and transcended the very different media he employs. In this suite of works he splits his exploration into two seminal chapters. The first suite seeks to expose light abstraction in nature’s passages. Amidst the earthy soil sediments, textural tenors reign supreme. Look closer and you sense a mosaic of moorings that revel in nature’s design dictates. 

 

The second suite is a flashback to the ethereal world of the great pedagogue Lazoly Moholy Nagy  who created  "photograms" in 1920s. These photograms born out of dark room drama are (photographs made without the use of a camera or negative) like Nagy, Burman is ultimately interested in studying how all basic elements interact. But there stops the similarity, if Nagy used objects , Burman uses colour . In more ways than one Burman highlights the power of photography as fine art, ‘not to define but to suggest the possibilities of photographic vision.’

 

Moholy Nagy, the principle player of the Abstract Expressionist form said: "The photogram, or camera-less record of forms produced by light, which embodies the unique nature of the photographic process, is the real key to photography."

 

Burman elucidates: Creating photograms has picked up pace recently with some very prominent and serious photographers from the West who have incorporated this in their fashion statements as well personal work. It is quintessentially playing and painting with light on photosensitive paper in complete darkness. Thus bringing about a very meditative quality and thought to the process”

 

Burman’s abstract doodles in colour become an exploration of the medium as he expands its capabilities and informs his expansive understanding of its role in the creation of art for a new age. Like Moholy-Nagy he makes these images without a camera, in the dark room  by squeezing  colour gels on or over the sheet of photographic paper and carefully directing the angle and movement of light, creating  enigmatic compositions in colour tones that transcend the sum of its parts.

 

Burman brings forward Moholy’s belief in the photogram as a tool for artistic expression. ‘ The photogram, or camera-less record of forms produced by light, which embodies the unique nature of the photographic process, is the real key to photography' he wrote in his 1933 essay A New Instrument of Vision.

 

For someone who handles colour every time he shoots for Architectural Digest, Vogue or GQ in Conde Nast publications, Burman’s dalliance with colour brims his own encyclopedia of an album of memories. This experimentation then is a novel experience of deliberate manipulation in dark room drama. He explains colour codes of subversion.

 

“The colours in the photograms are reversed...if we paint with blue light ,the colour comes yellow, because its going from negative to positive.. Similarly with red it gives a very interesting tone of Cyan. For me this is a very interesting interpretation spiritually.

 

Converting energy almost.. somehow churning out something positive from something negative, a process of cleansing. Naturally a lot of the symbolism therefore led me to play with religious and superstitious interpretations. A bit of darkness converted through light into a bright burst of symbolic colour. I am asking people again to see , to stop , to feel ..which is why the eye is consistent in many. Also there are many symbols of meditation .. or at least an impression of them ,” adds Burman.

Burman’s second suite is an ode to nature. In Burman’s handling of nature’s abstract studies we see quotidian objects transformed into pure compositional elements within a dynamic and animated whole. Dominating the images is the artful interaction of texture and tones in the palette of light’s prism. Colour connotations appear as a comparatively obscure network of tones  in the lower register. In these abstract studies, those portions of residual linear elements  rest directly on the photographic paper during exposure and are rendered with greater clarity. The alluringly indistinct rendering of the forms suggest that there was a suspension for a fragment of exposure time. We see a confluence of contrasting colour fields in this suite. Gravitas and depth moth intermingle to create a corollary of conversations that sift and sieve through the tenets of time and tide. Colour for Burman is many registers. He explains: 

 

“When I am photographing something it's also a lot to do with the colour of the light, weather, the amount of sunlight in both reflection and refractive indices. Colours change with these things and so do our reactions. I would think I am sensitive to these things, and deeply affected by what I see through the lens, it’s in constant flux, it changes several times a day.

 

Sometimes the somber deepness of greens mixed with elements of whites reminds me about our bodily functions...everything in the universe somehow seems really connected..I see colour and patterns repeated so many times in completely different things that are in no connection to each other otherwise. I love juxtaposing colour yes...for me it gives an interesting complexity to a  visual emotionally.”

 

This suite then stirs within us powerful emotions that can make all kinds of things materialize. We hear in them the sound of two parts detaching, the moment when nature is the most physical, the most raw and tangible that it will ever be. It is in this moment that the sounds come out; when the image becomes more than a mere metaphor.

 

 These abstracts contain within anti-vanitas logic. We think not of the blooming flowers and dewy botanics on old Dutch paintings, but  an emphasis on the peak of life in sober manifestations of what remains: the moulds detached, the skins shed; things become useless, and become art. To come back to the open fabric of nature, the flip side to its exposure is an invitation to care, just as nature is a space carved out for inhabitation. We could say there’s something desolate about these abstract studies, something empty, yet full about the scenes. But it is precisely amidst the material reality of that matrix of oneness, in this capturing of the aftermath, that we meet, finally, paradoxically, to acknowledge that nature is an embedded mutation with human memory.

 Viraag Desai calls his suite of translated 3D works as transitive’s. He divides his creative surge into chapters that he titled After the Void, Paroxysm as well as  Body Politic. The essence of form is his most integral design dynamic. His process and technique both call for scrutiny because it opens doors to a unique ingenuity. He invites us to open up to a great multiplicity of alternative ideas in sculptural signatures. The works themselves stand alone as hypnotizing, visually pleasing and prompting introspection, but they are activated in a certain context of all art explorations that have come before them, by breaking down binaries and reminding us that we as humans have continued to embark on new odysseys albeit after the pandemic.