Liminal affinities
Works by Digbijayee Khatua, Mainaz Bano, Mitali Shah, Saju Kunhan
Negotiating an urban landscape in constant flux opens up a diverse set of interpretative possibilities. It may be perceived as a dense mass of monolithic superstructures, or it may be experienced as a heterogeneous entity, continually animated by the tugs of socio-political, cultural, economic and environmental force fields.
The cityscape then becomes a site of confluence and collision, accumulating layers of history, whilst accommodating the upheavals of contested geographies. Wrought by the vagaries of time and the ambitions of human intervention, coalescing and fragmenting like an eternally whirring work in progress, the city, the metropolis, the megalopolis yet continues to exert a primal pull.
How do topographies constructed from material accretions get transformed into imagined, imaginary and metaphorical spaces? How do we access places that are at once strange, yet familiar; that feel both intimate and alien? Do we view them with the all-knowing eye of an insider, or do we look at them with the curious, questioning gaze of an outsider?
Liminal affinities brings together four artists who have chosen to posit themselves on the periphery of the present moment. By allowing themselves the simultaneity of looking both back and forward in time, and examining what’s on the surface and underneath it, they afford themselves and us a chance to grasp at the rough edges of the past, in order to gain a foothold on the deceptive realitiesof the present.
Their works are shaped by the dichotomies they encounter as they journey to and from the microcosm of the non-metropolitan to the macrocosm of the urban. Remnants of collective histories co-exist with residues of personal memories to unfold in their practice through distinct visual typologies.
Through nuanced, aesthetic evocations that include paintings on canvas and wood, sculptural installations and works on paper, Liminal affinities seeks to portray contemporary urgencies that inform our lived experiences within a complexand rapidly transforming urban milieu.