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Persisting threads

Special Courtesy: Exhibition 'Permanent Conference' curated by Shristi Sainani at Gallerie Nvya

If we reinterpret "threads" as synonymous with "threats" and "persistence" as akin to "permanency," a complex interlinked network emerges—an intricate, continental, outer-earth strategic venture connecting us globally. This elaborate web, composed of electro-lights, fiber, plastic, copper, rubber, nylon, iron, and more, acts as a constant Earth murmurer, a strategic vein within the contemporary civil-planetary earth system.

In today's scenarios, this web entangles us—fragmenting, contaminating, and fracturing our primal connections, once the bedrock of our existence. Challenges arise from errors in supercomputers and algorithmic misinterpretations, transforming glitches in this expansive system into everyday disruptions, impacting the fluidity of our lives and earthly connections.

From lower earth orbits to the deep sea, these maneuvers dangerously shift from symbolic to symbiotic value. Biotechnology, a driving force in our contemporary landscape, introduces highly powerful cyborgs, seamlessly integrating into our daily experiences. Amidst this rapid transformation, life appears easy for the majority, but for a significant portion, existence is threatened by explicit warfare, intrusive interrogations, pervasive surveillance, stifling censorship, and data loss.

Efforts to eradicate poverty, ensure dignified transportation, and provide sufficient clothing and shelter have persistently failed, this permanent failure is an oddly contrasting component to look at in the suffocating chambers of permanency and the human's search for mortality, scientific efforts to extend human presence in to other than earth planets.

Impermanence,    clashes with these different junctures of maximalist sophistication of modernity, our persisting effort to build genetic codes for mortality, and building multi-planetary systems, The Seemingly minimalist but extremely maximalist invasive and hands-free era results in a permanent gradation of inequality and segregation, perpetuates distress, disorder, and permanent errors within the entirety of system.

A different existentialist genre is now shaped solely by human nature, mediated by algorithmic empathy and jealousy.

 

Here the works not only depict an apocalyptic end of Earth or only contribute to the efforts to evoke ecological consciousness but to grasp the ‘ground reality'. a reality in which living becomes excruciatingly difficult for those trapped in underprivileged economic despair, experiencing intergenerational trauma, or lacking social and cultural capital for the common good of the planet Earth and its wider inheritors.

A firm re-take on a humanistic approach to detox solidarity among species rather than generating moral superiority by a caring nature. Nature, contamination, and truth are permanent yet malleable and relative simultaneously. This series aims to confront our challenging realities, urging reflection and collective action toward a more equitable and sustainable existence.

In a diverse context, artworks titled ‘Persisting Threads’ are imagined with failed, broken, dismantled, diseased, malleable, and inherently fragile components. These elements are arranged on closed and open shelves that are spread, fallen, trapped, blocked, erased, evacuated, and repurposed. Many of these objects are named after asteroids that slowly orbit the Earth, including 16 Psyche, the only metal asteroid we found in Earth's orbit. Through this approach, the artist seeks to prompt viewers to look beyond the surface, as the names provide an identity, akin to skin, to the unknown, the yet-to-be-discovered, or things we may think we don't know but actually may be familiar with.

The text is scattered across different locations within the objects and the exhibition space offers hints of the intricate errors inherent in modernity and sophistication. These errors can be linked to various ideological and philosophical perspectives on human existence as an individual and a community. The artwork also serves as a self-reflective exploration by the artist, who has experienced the death of close relatives and friends, missteps in the past, the loss of friendships, abandonment, exclusion, silencing, bedridden days due to bacterial infections, and so on.

Through personal and societal tensions in this body of work, the artist draws correlations between the biological and natural aspects of growth, decay, and death, making them visible within the context of one’s own body - flesh, skin, and debility as chronic elements of malleability. Here, nature is not viewed as an external source but as a multidirectional expansion of various Meta+bio+techno+cosmo logical threads that manifest life. The intention is to invite contemplation beyond the immediate visual experience and delve into the infinite intricate layers of existence, system errors, and dysfunctions concerning debility and aggressive sophistication in a fast phase, acknowledging both vulnerability and resilience.

a selection of works from this series 'Pesisting Threads' are part of the show 'Permanent Conference' Curated by Shristi Sainani at Gallerie Navya during the Delhi Art Week 2023.

"...The exhibition ''Permanent Confference' explores overlaps, interactions, and conjunctions between anatomies of man, machine, and nature. The classifications, as ingrained, show malleability in entities. 

... The exhibition is treated as an analytical framework, grounds of examination, to understand how identities instilled in typologies (of man, machine, and nature) carry similarities while also exuding personal means of varying discriminations and privileges. There is a precarity in definition when distanced from implanted memory. 'Permanent Conference' aims to interrogate these uncertainties, which occasionally come with glitches - glitches in systems, such as fluctuating automation errors or recurring corporeal anxieties."

 

-*excerpt from the curatorial note by Shristi Sainani.

The artwork title Title: (38071) 1999 GU3  is also part of the group show titled 'Care is Art, Art is Care', 2024 curated by Joana Alarcão as part of her curatorial venture 'Insight of a Young Artist' in collaboration with Underground Art And Design (UAAD) led by Xiaofan Jiang.

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