|
|
|
PREGNANT SEAHORSE A SUITE OF WORKS IN MULTIPLE MEDIUMS COLLECTION OF THE ESSL MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART ,KLOSTERNEUBERG, AUSTRIA 2010 |
|
 |
|
| The suite of works examines the human condition through the metaphor of the body in all its strengths and frailties. Stripped of its outer casing, contemporary life in urban India is marked by an intense psychological isolation, where images of comfort, intimacy and rest have been displaced by a sense of detachment, anxiety and apprehension. 'Traversing Terrains reflects the claustrophobic decadent existence and trauma of movement of the 'urban hybrid' and his aspirations. The work essentially plays around the notion of the 'injured self' and the self 'armored against hurt'.
'The Pregnant Seahorse' is a personal meditation on the passage of natures's cycle and the temporal flow of birth and regeneration. The human body is vulnerable, ephemeral. The work portrays the artists' body as a site of history, memory and transformation. The images are at once, generative and sensuous, macabre and degenerative, opulent and awe-inspiring, carrying within them the vitality of the living and the vulnerability of decay. The image of the sea horse is depicted in the works as a metaphor of sexual role reversal, where the male carries the offspring through gestation. Excerpts from 'India Awakens: Under The Banyan Tree' published by Essl Museum of Contemporary Art, Austria, 2010. | |
| MYSTERY AND INQUIRY RANJIT HOSKOTE 2014 In Sonia Mehra Chawla's works, the artist persona often appears as an archetypal figure mediating between the enigmas of the natural world and the experimental protocols that science devises to investigate them. Her mixed-media paintings, prints and video works assume the form of encounters between mystery and inquiry. In her 2009-2011 series, 'Some Roots Grow Upwards: The Transformative Experience of the Biological Imperative: Both Desired and Despised', for instance, the artist persona takes a nap on a couch while a dream play involving the human body, stripped to nerve, muscle and bone, unfolds around her; neural electricity links her to a ghostly X-ray double, heavy with child, and to pensive skeletons drawn from the history of anatomical representation. Her own bodily experiences, especially of pregnancy and childbirth, provide a recurrent basis for Sonia's reflections. Incrementally, during the last decade, she has developed a vocabulary of germination and gestation, phrased in placental and foetal forms as well as protozoan and plant images. In the 2011 diptych, 'The Sea Within' and the 2013 triptych, 'Embryonic Plant', she subverts the conventional symmetries of scale and detail in a gesture reminiscent of science-fiction scenarios of miniaturization; she inserts the artist persona into a universe dominated by the gigantically enlarged forms of micro-organisms, variously honeycombed, tasselled, tangled, globular or star-shaped. When Sonia presents us with the complex and visually exciting micro-architecture of cellular structures, of ganglia and cortices, spores, packed seed-pods and streaming plankton, she draws us into an experience of abundant and versatile aesthetic stimulation but also into a visual regime framed rigorously by the optics of microscopy, radiography and nanography. On a preliminary viewing, it may appear that the primary impulse in Sonia's practice a lyrical and expressive one, geared towards the production of tapestried images that celebrate the domain of organic forms invisible to the naked eye. Closer engagement reveals, however, that her practice is also sustained by a compelling conceptual orientation: a fascination with imaging itself, the constant translation of experience into image, as a key mode by which the human consciousness anchors itself in the world. Excerpts from Mystery and Inquiry: Reflections on Sonia Mehra Chawla's 'Scapelands', by Ranjit Hoskote | |
|
|
| Installation views from 'India Awakens: Under The Banyan Tree' curated by Dr Alka Pande at Essl Museum of Contemporary Art, Austria, 2010. |
|
| CURATORIAL THOUGHTS BEHIND 'INDIA AWAKENS: UNDER THE BANYAN TREE' ALKA PANDE 2010 "India is, the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grandmother of tradition. Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only." Mark Twain
| |
|
 |
 |
 |
||
 |
 |
 |
||
 |
 |
|||
