Tradition and development: Kalakriti Art Gallery promotes conversations on modernity
In this photo essay from a leading art gallery in Hyderabad, we showcase more highlights from a joint exhibition.
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Kalakriti Art Gallery is currently hosting two contrasting exhibitions titled Eternal Lotus and Disappearing Echoes of the Isolated. See our coverage of earlier exhibitions at this leading art gallery in Hyderabad here.
The first exhibition features the traditional pichwai art style from Rajasthan. The second one showcases surrealism works by multi-disciplinary artist Satadru Sovan Banduri.
The pichwai artworks feature traditional renderings of lotus ponds and cows, and narratives around Lord Krishna. Some of the paintings distil symbolic elements into modern design, thus celebrating continuity and innovation in the same space.
The overall effect of this collection is to provoke reflection on the traditional symbols and rituals of devotion, while also renewing their meaning in modern cultural landscapes. The exhibition is simultaneously a form of homage as well as a showcase of the timelessness of such art forms.
Alongside the two art exhibitions, the gallery also features community meetups for creative exchange. For example, The Thinking Cup creates curated experiences with expert storytelling, reflection, and deeper connections where silence is embraced.
In detailed curatorial notes, art curator and historian Satyajit Dave describes the works of Satadru Sovan Banduri. “His art often features commentaries on cyberspace and consumerism,” Dave says.
Within his art practice, Banduri explores socio-cultural hybridity. “He is interested in how distinct cultural experiences have shaped us all, the points where these distinctions overlap, and where unique, hybrid and odd cultural forms emerge,” Dave explains.
“Banduri’s practice emerges at the intersection of speculative ecology and metamorphic embodiment,” Dave adds. The artist works across a range of media, with elements of fantasy, surrealism, visual poetics, and even dreamlike dystopian psychedelia.
The artist creates imaginary worlds full of hybridity, mutation and ontological play, which still seem grounded in everyday elements. “Banduri does not represent reality but composes ontological experiments,” Dave observes.
“In Banduri’s world, bodies are porous, agency is distributed, and identity is always in process,” the curator explains. The artist’s temporalities resist linearity – instead, his canvases operate within deep time, a geological concept.
Dave draws our attention to the elements of rupture and even hijacking in the art, with haunting images of urban development and the erasure it can cause to local wildlife and havoc to habitats.
Banduri’s lush layering of colours and images has a dramatic effect. “These are not merely aesthetic choices but political strategies,” Davi affirms. There are elements of disobedience, excess, taste, and restraint woven in.
The artist invites viewers to speculate on the possible and the potential, and explore their limits of understanding, control and impact. The lack of coherent answers or even stable meaning can be uncomfortable as well.
“Banduri’s works stage speculative encounters―with ruin, with pleasure, with afterlife. His work invites not passive viewing but what Eve Sedgwick described as ‘reparative reading’, a way of engaging art that embraces contradiction, affect, and ambiguity,” Dave signs off.
Now, what have you done today to pause in your busy schedule and harness your creative side for a better world?
(All photographs taken by Madanmohan Rao on location at Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad.)
Edited by Suman Singh