surekha & shantamani

Flames, flowers and other images
An installation of sculptures, photo and video
by
Surekha
17 Aug - 06 Sept

Silent Speech: The space between my hands
Paintings and paper casts
by
Shantamani
17 Aug - 06 Sept

Shanthamani's earlier work focused on the industrial urban landscape. She fractured her objects from a functional state and constructed another reality. Her canvases looked like an aftermath of violence; with gestures of tactile expressions and delineation.

The artist has emphasized the human presence with her sensibility, heralding the return of the hand from exile into the mechanical world. It is her attempt to return the spiritual to the material.

The recent works are focused on the gestures of the hand in acts of labour and celebration. Her work "silent speech" is not about opposing growth but locating the self in it. Her body is the canvas of subjective interpretation and transformation, as she layers it with codes and text that voice her social concerns.

Her images suggest the underlying concern of the urban metropolis-displacement, migration and the notion of the cyber coolie. She weaves the iconography of gestures and fragmented narratives of the human hand. Her underlying discourse about gender is evident to create a new visual experience and validity.

Surekha
As a multi-media artist Surekha has been exploring the gendered self as a self-conscious choice. Her works from the 1990's explored diverse materials as metaphors. She negotiates the public and private realm with ease, transcending genres and locating the body as a site of contestation and appropriation.

Her feminist aesthetics and cutting edge strategies move beyond the confinement of
two dimensionality into a multidisciplinary approach. She uses domestic skills like stitching to explore an aesthetic way of living; and a craft with contemporary concerns relating to women's labour and life.

Her recent body of work uses photography to archive and document, performance and masquerade. Images become memory and recollection of feminine spaces and gestures. Her video- installation called "Communing with Urban Heroines" takes on the issues of women as survivors of domestic violence and moves away from the victim mode and celebrates the survivors. The mundane becomes magical and mythic. The simple game/life becomes a poetic evocation of endurance and strength. Surekha has an ability to use material and media with conviction and like her own heroines, she will endure.

SURESH JAYARAM
Bangalore