The Promise of the Depth of Being
“The modern loss of faith does not concern just god or the hereafter. It involves reality itself and makes human life radically fleeting. Life has never been as fleeting as it is today. Not just human life, but the world in general is becoming radically fleeting. Nothing promises duration or substance. “
(Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society)
Is art a model for rethinking and re-imagining the continuum of life on earth? How do we think about the world within its fleeting rhythm and degenerating spaces? Contemporary art and speculative philosophy often grapple with these pressing concerns. We are not encountering merely a changing world but a disintegrating sense of the world historically built through diverse human experiences. The change in temporality and the experience of time are heavily dictated by algorithms and the economy of attention. This radical compression of the experience of time delimits the scope of engagement. Not just speed but a fundamental shift in the idea of engagement – what Byung-Chul Han broadly characterises as “the society of exhaustion” in his book The Burnout Society. The relentless acceleration fractures perception, generating an incoherent sense of the world we see around us, where the meanings are synthesised transiently. Subsequently, it manufactures homogenised meanings and effects, with pre-fabricated narratives and symbols.
It is against this derangement that the artistic thinking shifts its registers and existing models. The artistic practice is not about making utopic propositions but about demonstrating a capacity for ongoing, thoughtful reconfiguration in a broken world, making avenues of engagement rather than monuments of expression. It provokes new imaginations of social, political and cultural identities. The cultural identities that are not callous, but a composite of lived experiences of mutual aid and shared vulnerability. They assemble identities not as fortified, coherent units, but as fragile ecosystems of relation, acknowledging vulnerability and engagement as the tropes of connections. In this radically disintegrating world, the profound ways of resistance and re-imagination emerges from repairing, repurposing, and reconceptualising what already exists. It is from these deliberate, often unorganised spaces of the present that art proposes alternative ways of rethinking the world. It does not picture a new continuum of life from a distance but actively and thoughtfully begins to weave its threads into a pattern of resilience.
Abela Ruben’s practice draws from the immediate topography of her domicile, interior emotional states, and cinematic language. The images possess a distinct theatricality, eliciting instinctive and ambiguous responses that resonate deeply with her visual field. Her geographic relocation from Kerala to Baroda for academic pursuits played an instrumental role in expanding both her visual lexicon and use of materials. Aman Kumar’s work operates through a rhizomatic style of depiction, synthesising two distinct historiographic lineages: the tradition of Indian miniature painting and the Northern European Renaissance, with particular reference to Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch. The multi-figure tableaus in his work achieve a theatrical spatiality through repetitive, non-linear perspectives and intricate micro-detailing. By employing traditional methods and materials, his practice asserts a radical aesthetic stance against a contemporary milieu dominated by the hyper-object-oriented digital age. A defining characteristic of Anurag Paul’s work is his sophisticated engagement with the idea of visual narration. The ostensibly mundane, often passive figures and their gestures function not as sentimental vignettes but as dense sites of social and psychological data. They reveal the fissures within the homogenised surface of the everyday, pointing toward the complex construction of identity and belonging within urban topographies. Farhin Afza’s multidisciplinary practice, consisting of printmaking, photography, installation, and digital design, interrogates the stratifications of identity, mapping the complex interstices of memory, place, and belonging. Deeply informed by specific geo-cultural contexts—her roots in Bihar Sharif, the formative urban exposure of Delhi, and her current domicile in Hyderabad—her work, while biographical, constructs a critical framework for analysing the formation of a diasporic consciousness within the nation-state. Manoj Kumar Pannala’s practice is methodologically grounded in a critical engagement with site-specific and vernacular archives. Its conceptual core involves an unflinching interrogation of the socio-political and historical fabric of Telangana. His work operates as a critical apparatus to expose the structural violence inflicted upon marginalised communities, primarily Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes, through systemic dispossession and caste-based oppression. In Mitali Das’s work, bodies are rendered as porous, vulnerable, and in a perpetual state of metamorphosis. By challenging heteronormative and patriarchal imperatives of bodily integrity, youthful idealisation, and emotional invulnerability, her practice becomes a site of biopolitical resistance. Here, the ageing, desiring, and emotionally exposed feminine body is re-coded as a locus of generative potential and ecological entanglement. Pankaj Sarma’s work is rooted in the fluvial landscapes of Assam and their attendant social and ecological shifts. He critically examines the transformation of these terrains, their temporality, and spatial erosion within the broader framework of the Anthropocene. Central to his inquiry is how altered topographies impact collective memory, with a specific focus on the profound psychological distress or solastalgia, engendered by radical environmental change. His practice examines how riverine communities confront the loss of domicile and livelihood due to catastrophic flooding, erratic weather, and state-led development projects. The thematic core of Rahul Sarkar’s artistic inquiry is the construction and performance of androgynous masculinity. A significant material and symbolic trope within their practice is the strategic deployment of ornamentation. Transcending a merely decorative impulse, Sarkar reframes ornament as a semiotic device for articulating internal mental landscapes and psychological terrains. The representation of bodies exceeds portraiture, operating as a critical visual field that narrates the phobias, affective states, and intimate subcultures constitutive of contemporary queer existence. Sanyukta Kudtarkar’s practice derives from a sustained inquiry into the idea of belonging. It questions how presence, space, and memory coalesce to form identity by critically engaging with the psychogeography of her formative environment. Tejal Kawachi’s lens-based practice is a critical inquiry into the politics of the chronically medicated body, interrogating the complex dialectic of care and control inherent in a state of perpetual medical dependence. Incorporating self-portraiture, material experimentation, and the archival reworking of medical detritus, her work explores how medical objects assert their presence beyond mere utility, becoming charged nodes within a network of affect, discipline, and existential negotiation.
-Sayanth R S
