While many exhibitions show work from different artists, different media and even different eras, they normally still share a common theme or idea. The exhibition "Four Projects" at India's Gallery Skye makes the bold decision to refuse any unifying idea amongst the works. The only mutual ground between artists Sunoj D, Abhishek Hazra, Abir Karmakar and Orijit Sen is the physical ground of the gallery space.
Abhishek Hazra's works examine the social history of science, especially the origins of scientific terminology in colonial India. His video piece toys with the politics of translation through an unsettling close-up of a moving mouth, at once familiar and unknown. For Abir Karmakar's "Scent of a Bed," the artist invited 3 men to take turns sleeping naked in a hotel bed. The piece shows the "absent presence" of others that is sometimes experienced in a lone hotel room.
Orijit Sen, regarded as the first graphic novelist in India, will show a massive hand-drawn mural two and a half years in the making. Twenty artists worked together to create this highly detailed glimpse of Punjab and its people. Sunoj D's works explore the relationship between man and nature, nature and artifice, relic and memory. Sen's works depict the point when the artificial become inseparable from the real.
In a sense, this is sort of an anti-exhibition, because it refuses to cohere in the expected manner. And yet the "Four Projects" present an stimulating and honest vision of Indian contemporary art.
"Four Projects" will show at Gallery Skye until May 11.
