'Three Tales of Another Microcosm'

Anushka Rajendran

Fantastical tales that epic and science fiction narratives project into lands far, far away are larger than life shadows springing from dark sublime/abject corners of our present. Slipping through the interstices in eternal heterotopias that weave hegemonic histories of civilizational glory and tragedy are senses of time and space that are absent from their grand narratives. This exhibition is a withdrawal into microcosms that reside in our terrestrial realities, flushing us down a rabbit hole for encounters mediated by the artists’ magnifying glass.

Minal Damani literally takes down the drain, tracing the journey of debris from mucky gutters into the deep blue sea, and the universes they occupy. We are the sky, and our bodily refuse such as strands of hair that escape our corporeality return to the sky. This preoccupation with mythologies of quotidian waste opens up to Vineha Sharma’s formal inquires. If we were to imagine aesthetics for time, that too lost time, what would it be? Working with her own memories, especially those that are non-extraordinary, and the phenomenology of undocumented time, the artist invents a visual language that can salvage their imprints.

This archaeological enterprise of excavating from the fringes of historical time yields to D Priyanka’s concern with epistemological frameworks that dictate our understanding of the universe and life forms. If we made gods in our own image, how do we imagine life on planets light-years away from us? In the fictional hybrid galaxy of Lainika — which is of her own invention — she orchestrates a meticulous simulation of the semiotics and epistemes that have come to dictate scientific studies of planet Earth. This self-conscious process mirrors limiting empirical frameworks that prescribe our experience and consequently unravels the structural logic that is implicit in our everyday lives through mythologies of an elsewhere.

The minor narratives of these artists are a point of entry to tangible and ephemeral themes that are universal resonances and yet permeate immediate realities in unassuming ways. These are spectacles shunned from spectacular tales that we tell ourselves about who we are and what we do.