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UNCHARTED TERRAIN DIPTYCH PAINTING ACRYLIC, SERIGRAPHY, INKS AND OILS ON CANVAS 2015 |
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"UNMAPPED, UNFAMILIAR, UNREVEALED, UNKNOWN, UNTRAVELED, UNEXPOSED, UNASCERTAINED, UNDISTINGUISHED, UNFATHOMED, UNEXPLORED, UNAPPREHENDED, UNEXPLAINED, UNCHARTED TERRAINS OF OUR MINDS" | |
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"The sight of it fills one with more conflicting emotions than any other scene with which I am familiar. It is at once weird, fascinating, enchanting, repellent, of exquisite beauty and at times terrifying in its austere-dignity and oppressing stillness." | |
| MYSTERY AND INQUIRY REFLECTIONS ON SONIA MEHRA CHAWLA'S 'SCAPELANDS' RANJIT HOSKOTE 2015 Fluidly combining the phases of expedition, research, documentation and meditation in 'Scapelands', Sonia moves outward into diverse terrains of the natural world and simultaneously inward into the history of artistic practice, renewing landscape as a genre. Her project title is instructive: she inverts the two elements of the genre appellation, 'landscape', generating a semantic shift. 'Landscape' announces itself as artifice, for it does not exist in nature; it is the artistic imagination's proposal of a particular way of representing or symbolizing the natural world, of transforming nature into subject. Its mirror twin, 'Scapeland', turns this relationship between subject and artifice around, making the '-scape' the focus of inquiry, engaging with the internalized aesthetic concepts and art-historical categories that form an integral part of our lifeworld. The resulting findings constitute a territory that belongs equally to the cartographer and the psychonaut, at once geographic and oneiric. 'Scapelands' is a sophisticated response to six locales: the Sundarbans in West Bengal and Pichavaram in Tamil Nadu, both mangrove estuaries that the artist has navigated; Goa and Pondicherry, where she has taken intricately commingled roots as her subject; the forests of Uttarakhand; and a riverine course in Thailand. All these landscapes are premised on the matrix of origin, a site both of nurture and hazard: 'Scapelands' gestures towards the mythology of the hidden source. Sonia taps here into a deep stratum of belief, cultural experience and artistic representation, defined by the philosopher and art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy, following the Sanskritist R E Hume, as the 'Water Cosmology'. "A belief in the origin of life in the waters was common to many ancient cultures, and must have arisen very naturally in the case of peoples like those of the Nile, the Euphrates, or the Indus Valley, among whom water, in the form of either seasonal rains or ever-flowing rivers was the most obvious prerequisite of vegetative increase," writes Coomaraswamy. "The Water Cosmology conceives of certain powers of abundance who direct, or at least symbolize or represent the operations of life as it wells upward from its source in the waters." [2] The 'Scapelands' project includes an excursus through a riparian landscape in Thailand, where the water alternately immerses and reveals a sequence of rock reefs. The image dwells on the interplay of surface and cavity, the pitting of erosion marking the passage of the geological calendar. As the eye widens to take in the panorama, it is the rapture of detail that seizes it. The images gathered together to form 'Scapelands' act both as entries in a journal, shaped within time, and as a cycle of archetypes standing outside the flux of time. 'Scapelands' challenges the pessimism with which the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss regards the possibility of quest in the modern world, on a planet unified but robbed of its mystery by technology. In his celebrated memoirs, Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss wrote: "Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished. A proliferating and overexcited civilization has broken the silence of the seas once and for all ... and dooms us to acquire only contaminated memories." [7] Sonia Mehra Chawla's prints and video works elude the tourist's simple categorizations; instead, they record a pilgrim's encounters with a universe that retains a measure of unfathomable otherness. Excerpts from Mystery and Inquiry: Reflections on Sonia Mehra Chawla's 'Scapelands', by Ranjit Hoskote ... Read more http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/yinchuan-biennale-2016/ | |
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