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| “FLOW-II” metal beads {ghungroos} on fabric, 48“ x 96”, 2014 |
This text has been written for Vibha Galhotra's Solo booth Art|Basel Hong Kong|May|15--18
Vibha Galhotra has emerged as one of the most important
sculptural abstractionist; developing a language within ‘new genre sculpture’.
Over the years her works have carried deep empathy with concerns about public
spaces and environment, which have been encoded in large sculptural poetries.
As one of the rare artist who makes large scale sculptures and assemblages, and
give them a value beyond the ‘Spectacle'*, Galhotra’s works gives us moments of
pause and contemplation in the ‘contemporary society of the hyper spectacular’.
Matte, monochromatic, darkness, rust come into making a language that has
created an alternative to the bling, plasma, and fluorescent dominated
contemporary visual culture.
Galhotra symbolizes the eclectic turn in
contemporary understanding of medium and material. Her practice has always
resisted being framed by the medium.She works in varied mediums including photography,
animation, found object, performance, installation and sculpture. Each material
is used for a reason to convey the conceptual thread. Monumental scale and
intimate use of material open up ways to go beyond the dystopia of mainstream
urbanity and imagine an alternative narrative. For her medium becomes a mean to
create and consider different narratives about globalization and growth. Her
work has always transgressed the zones between art and citizenship -
challenging definitions of art, ecology, economy, science, spirituality and
activism.
Abstraction has always been a significant tool for artists
seeking to (re) create emptiness (void) in space and time. Philosophically this
question of absence and presence has been felt to be one of the biggest
challenges for artists. For Galhotra these questions of emptiness, void, pause
have been the most important formal challenges. Especially because her work is
(also) a medium for her to express deep concerns about public spaces and lived
environment along with her emotional connect with nature. Ideology and
detachment both become important for Galhotra. This makes Galhotra an artist
who transgresses the definitions of narrative and abstraction.
“FLOW is a series of work which
started with mapping of the river passing by the city I live in. My intention
is to recreate an image by deconstructing the existing image. As mentioned
above that the walks around the flowing river which is dead now has been the
inspiration for this series of work. I being an observer and documenting the
time, layering life with the flowing river. I am creating a organically sewn,
aesthetical surface to invite the viewer, to the clean and beautiful facade to
talk about the chaos behind.”
Vibha Galhotra
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| “FLOW” metal beads {ghungroos} on fabric, 84 x 96, 2014 |
When mighty rivers flow, they carry with them memories of
land they flow by as sediments. From being fertile, to being toxic, to healing,
these sediments are embedded with markers of the lands and civilizations and
their relationship with nature. Flow is a metaphor that works within the zones
of temporality and permanence; we attach it to time, water, life and thoughts.
Her practice works within the poetry around the aesthetics of flow and the
memories of sediments.
The murder of Yamuna by all the toxic waste being pumped in
by the city of Delhi was very disturbing for the artist and brought her to the
doors of exploring larger questions about relationship between rivers and the
civilizations. Emotionally there was a realization that these rivers have been
suffocated and poisoned by the great cities that they have nurtured. One can
register this as the basic impulse that has lead the artist to explore rivers
and work with the markers and memories they carry.
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| Gallery View- SEDIMENTS AND THE OTHER UNTITLED..... at Exhibit320 |
However Galhotra is not
interested in lapsing the space between aesthetics and ideology, in fact
working with both, yet bypassing both these binaries creates the key value in
her artistic practice. Thus we come across a body of works which is deeply (in)
vested in citizenship, yet marking the confluence of aesthetics and
hermeneutics in an neo-Kantian manner, exploring how narratives and temporality
interact and ultimately return to the question of the meaning of being, the self
and self-identity.
Flow layers the discourse of Globalisation with Universalism
and Neo Kantian Humanism. The rivers and their sediments become reflections of
contemporary humanity and the environment that we shape. Yet these reflections
are not shiny, they don’t jump out asking you to see them, they open the space
for imagination to travel, for the senses to get a break away from the visual
culture of contemporary urbanity. Creating metaphors through shapes she
fashions space and time for the reflection to come from within.
*“The Society of the Spectacle” by Guy Debord. First published during 1967 in France.
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