Here's how five artists, in Goa, are using visual art to narrate stories, emotions and more

The exhibition ‘Time, Space, Memory: Decoding Contemporary Video’ at Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts, is as thought-provoking as it is artistic
Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts exhibition ‘Time, Space, Memory: decoding contemporary video’
Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts exhibition ‘Time, Space, Memory: decoding contemporary video’

For years, people have been using word of mouth to communicate stories, emotions and feelings. Sunaparanta's latest exhibition 'Time, Space, Memory: Decoding Contemporary Video’ showcases the work of five artists who are using visual art to convey messages, narrate stories, evoke emotions and trigger imagination.

The ongoing exhibition at Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts, Altinho, Panjim, features the work of Divesh Gadekar, Srinivas Mangipudi, Enit María, Dhiraj Pednekar and Afrah Shafiq, who use moving images as a tool for aesthetic inquiry.

Invasion work by Dhiraj Pednekar
Invasion work by Dhiraj Pednekar

The exhibition

The work of the artists is a result of the media's expansive nature and extension into fiction, popular culture, storytelling, while also integrating photography, animation, painting, drawing, sound and digital media.

The exhibition provokes the viewer to understand, both, the subject and its form. The viewer is made to navigate through the artificial landscape, though the binaries between real and imagined fluctuates. One can experience the video's hybrid qualities through non-linear formats that enable a relational engagement.

Divesh Gadekar

Divesh Gadekar makes use of an animate stop-frame video to show how nature and local festivities connect. He uses a video of a mound of clay, which is carved into a Ganesh idol.

This is meant to show that what comes from the earth returns to it. The artist makes the viewer reflect on the cycle of life, and non-life, against a backdrop of lush vegetation in delicate watercolours.

You can see the fragility of nature and also understand how contemporary rituals have been integrated into it.

Enit María and Srinivas Mangipudi

When you walk into ‘Sob a cúpula (Under the Cupola)’ work by Enit María and Srinivas Mangipudi, you understand how light and sound is used to recreate a celestial experience, an experience which is created by the artists.

They have worked to generate a sea of sound vibrations and superimposed the notes of Indian music -- sa, re, ga, ma, pa, dha, ni -- such that they randomly interfere with each other, producing waves of microtonal frequencies merging together.

The viewer can feel one with themselves as the photographs captured by the artists flash on the screen above. These are photographs abstracted from the light captured under a canopy of Monstera deliciosa plants mirroring our star system in motion.

Dhiraj Pednekar

Dhiraj Pednekar's uses a stop motion video to show how trees and architectural constructs are seen by termites who try to colonize a given space.

With an interesting viewpoint, one can coalesce the natural and artificial landscape through abstraction.

It shows how their invasion creates space for constant change, thus creating a sense of movement which is intangible and often experiential in nature. This video is an accumulation of over 1,700 still images which involves physical manipulation of a certain kind, albeit brief, which allows the stills to exhibit a degree of independent motion.

The manipulative aspect involved in the production of the video mimics the ways in which people manipulate their landscape, incorporating layered experiences into the mind-scape.

Work by Afrah Shafiq
Work by Afrah Shafiq

Afrah Shafiq

Afrah uses her multimedia story to dive back into history. She explores the relationship between women and the colonial education movement in India. She uses archival imagery, women’s writing and history.

Enter Sultana’s Reality draws its title from Sultana’s Dream, the 1905 science-fiction short story of feminist utopia, by Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein.

Following an Alice-in-Wonderland style adventure, it explores the inner lives of the first generation of women to be educated in pre-independent India. It brings to life accounts of different women and reveals a universe of women’s lives as they were actually lived – outside the confines of bad and good behaviour.

Details:

WHERE: Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts, Altinho, Panjim

WHEN: On view till September 17, 2022

TIMINGS: 10.00 am to 6.30 pm (Monday to Saturday)

CONTACT: www.sgcfa.org

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