Fabric contexts
A group show Porous features sculpture, architecture, drawing, installation and performances by Ruby Chishti, Rakhi Peswani and Priyanka Choudhary. It explores linkages between historical, cultural and social contexts and phenomenological experiences of the materials through the different mediums and treatments by these young artists.
One of the more interesting approaches to material is that of Rakhi Peswani who has combined malleable materials like cloth, needle, thread. For her each material seems to speak of the histories of people, its use by the same people and its visuality. In Inside the melancholic object, a large installation on display, she has used cotton calico, handloom cotton, coffee, synthetic wool to speak of the burdens and baggage that migrant workers bring with them as they move from village to cities. The bundles encompass not just their belongings but also their hopes, aspirations and anxiety confronted as they are with a hostile and alien environment.
Ruby Chishti also reflects fragments of memory, dislocation and migration through her sculptural works, however, her works deal with a microcosmic world, with the personal rather than the macrocosm. The used fabric of clothes, the splotches and stitches speak of her family’s move from Lahore to New York and her own engagement with the new environment.
Use of clothes, laces, hair, wire, insects and the like surface in Priyanka Choudhary’s work as she challenges the limits of art practice. In the Goat Eater, she has encaged stained glass shards of green in a wooden structure resembling grass. Juul Kraijer’s drawings in charcoal and pastel are ethereal and light. She works with female heads, through repetition, rubbing and wiping to build layers of experiences, meanings and interpretations.
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