FRUITS TO LABOUR A MONUMENT TO EXHAUSTION
2013

Cloth fades, bleeds, stains, tears and dyes. This work attempts to take such material attributes of textiles and transform them into spatial metaphors, engaging the viewer with cultural narratives seeping from the physicality of the medium of fabric.
The rudimentary impression of the work is derived from temporary relief shelters/tents, pitched at sites of displacement, construction, migrations, devastations and various intensities of these situations. These social ruptures of modernity are microcosms that the our world witnesses closely and repetitively. Between the larger authorized grand narratives of development and modernity, these mass, social ruptures imprint experiences on individual lives. The experiences, most often resonate as spatial sites of architecture, and the material- textile - a material that marks the line between the private and the public.
Embracing the viewer within the space of the museum, the work opens up an experiential realm within this cosmetic, cultural, public space. The phenomenological experience of architecture within architecture attempts to create a double layering, a retelling of a well-told tale. The tableau represents textile’s ability to drape and fall, but also to hold itself taut, with harnesses and supports; its capacity to shrivel, shrink and get parched, much like the skin, when exposed too much. The work, as a temporary shelter carries an association of a larger body that stands desolately, shapes and gets shaped, covers, hides and yet looms above our fragile individual selves. It holds an authorial structure above the body of the public (like skin to our bones and body, and clothes to an individual’s civilizing process), enduring and withstanding all the fissures that a social body undergoes in the modernizing project. It directs attention to the abilities- techniques that stand at that crucial juncture between the pre and post of the modernizing project.