Emami Art presents Insubordinate Matter, the exhibition of the sixth edition of IMAGINARIUM, Emami Art’s Annual All-India Open Call for Young and Emerging Artists.
Insubordinate Matter
The sixth edition of IMAGINARIUM's annual open-call exhibition, Insubordinate Matter brings together the practices of ten young and emerging artists whose approaches to methods and materials are diverse and eclectic. The artists gathered here are in their mid-twenties to early thirties, and their practices run through sculpture, painting, drawing, installation and the expanded fields of the ceramic, the textile and the found object.
Art from South Asia has long arrived burdened with interpretive obligations. A certain style of reading it has required a ready framework, whether postcolonial, nationalist, diasporic or identitarian, and the work is often asked to testify before it is allowed to exist. Younger artists often meet a critical apparatus that is overtly politicised and arrives before the work does, a narrative that is, in effect, forced and weakly grounded. What would be interesting is to reverse this order of reading and interpretation. If we begin with the material and its handling, politics appears as something that emerges from the work rather than something imposed on it. Method and matter shape each other. The hand teaches the material, the material corrects the hand, and a worldview takes form in the exchange.
Insubordinate is an apt word to enter here. It is a method. Many of the artists are young, and their work arrives at a moment when the question of what we inherit, from families, institutions, landscapes and economies, feels newly urgent. What the exhibition proposes is a different order of attention. If matter can refuse, then to look carefully is to enter a negotiation. This is no longer a reading of symbols. It asks us to follow how things behave and what they carry, and to notice what they will not let go. The artists have not yet been told what their materials must mean. They are, for now, free to find out.
What that freedom looks like can be seen across the ten, in the sheer range of what they choose to work with and what they ask it to hold. Bhagyashri Dange works across drawing, painting and printmaking, building a vocabulary of geometric form and sign in which the body appears as something conditioned and sensed rather than depicted, the female body in particular surfacing as a record of what it has absorbed. Sonu Pujar draws textile, organic and domestic material into sculpture, installation and performance, her attention falling on the work of care that usually goes unseen and on the question of who tends whom, while Subhash Deka, working from Assam, translates the rhythms and textures of the natural world into sculptural form, letting a sense of place and the entanglement of human and ecological life be felt in the material itself. Srijita Raha works with cloth and natural dye, letting the fabric take, fray and hold its colour so that girlhood, vulnerability and the small displacements of feeling settle into the weave rather than being described, and Tithi Das paints from archival photographs, building the image in layers of acrylic until her figures arrive already remembered, holding grief, care and inheritance at the edge where the familiar turns strange. Annanya Dhanda reworks the objects of the household into soft sculpture, photography, performance and installation, approaching through ordinary domestic material the bond between mother and daughter and the intimacy that passes through a shared home, while Ayushi Shukla works classical and traditional visual languages into sculpture, her fragmented forms holding the heritage of the Ganga against the pressures of modernity so that loss and continuity occupy the same object. Dibbya Mudi, from rural Bengal, weaves and stitches discarded industrial rubber into sculptural form, bringing craft technique to bear on industrial waste so that labour is made visible and the material argues for repair and endurance; Shibayan Halder works across wood carving, sculpture, installation, performance, photography and video, rooted in the landscapes of South 24 Parganas, where natural and found materials carry the pressures of ecology, politics and marginalisation; and Siya Raju works in ceramics and glass, pressing both toward the cycles of growth and adaptation that run through the living world, her forms figuring attachment, coexistence and a fragile dependence between human relationship and natural form.
About IMAGINARIUM
Now in its sixth year, IMAGINARIUM exists because talent in this country is distributed far more evenly than opportunity. The infrastructure that lets a young practice survive its first years, the studios, the exhibitions, the people nearby who read the work as work, gathers in a few cities and thins to almost nothing beyond them, and a great deal of what is made outside those centres is simply never seen. The programme is an attempt to see it. Each year an open call draws applications from across the country. The awards are not symbolic. A first award of two lakh rupees, a second of one and a half, and a third of one lakh, supported by the Emami Foundation and the Kolkata Centre for Creativity, can sustain a year or more of a practice, which is often the difference between continuing and stopping. The ten artists of this edition were selected by a jury of five, Ibrahim Mahama, May Makki, Siddharth Somaiya, Shaunak Mahbubani, and Ushmita Sahu who reviewed the portfolios independently and arrived, separately, at this cohort.
