Signs Taken for Wonders

Making her monumental kalamkari creations for the exhibition Signs Taken for Wonders in 2019, Lavanya Mani had seen certain signs: the wildfires in Australia that scorched the earth were raising black plumes of smoke in the sky; floods had killed thousands and rendered landscapes unrecognizable. The climate crisis had come sooner than we thought. At this time, Mani filled her darkened skies with crows and other auguries, remembering the Indian parable that if a crow comes, you will have a visitor. Yet when March of 2020 arrived, her works, Auguries, Improbable Planet, Spectral Objects, seemed to have portended something more, to have anticipated the unimaginable. As the world looked to ancient and medieval times and the history of plagues, Mani’s works offered a particular kind of haunting that wrestled with both the wonder and violence of the past and the uncertainty billowing from the future.