The canvas of our time

I LIKE IT. WHAT IS IT?, 2019, acrylic on canvas

An exhibition during a pandemic is like no other. And Sameer Kulavoor has mixed feelings about his latest one that opens tomorrow at the Colaba gallery TARQ. "It was getting hard to focus this year but because of the show I could put myself together in the last two to three months," he says.

Sameer Kulavoor, VIRAL CONTENT, 2019, Acrylic on Canvas

The title, YOU ARE ALL CAUGHT UP (a message that pops up on Instagram after you've seen every post on your feed in the last 48 hours), he tells us, was a struggle to arrive at, but proved to be a good fit as it encompassed the personal and the political, coupled with some ambiguity.

Sameer Kulavoor

In 27 works, Kulavoor explores a range of subjects and events that still remain alive in collective memory. After his last solo, A Man of the Crowd (in 2018), he was working around the themes of social media and its algorithms, which is where works like I Like It. What Is It? with heads buried inside the blue light of smartphones stem from. The following year, everything changed - there was the abrogation of Article 370, followed by the anti-CAA/NRC protests - and one's mental state was also affected by it. So, he decided to respond to them with urgency. Read and Resist, the last work he completed before the pandemic surfaced, is inspired by an enclosure in Delhi's Shaheen Baug helmed by volunteers that served as a sort of day care where children could read and draw while their mothers participated in the protests. There, Kulavoor found hope.

In the last eight months bound by the pandemic, Kulavoor took a slight departure from his figurative work, moving on to structures - where elements in urban spaces are entangled in a convoluted plot. "I made this when I had no figurative inspiration. I looked at how structures seemed meaningless when there was no humanity around it - like a gigantic building that is empty or a station which was once a buzzing place where you could get lost looking at people," he shares.

In a set of five, small watercolour works he subverts the idea of a home. The artist explains that he was exploring the vagaries of personal space; that the home seems to be a safe space only when you have access to the outside world. "Once that is taken away from you, your house feels strange; like a place you're dying to escape from. We've heard stories of violence and domestic abuse during the pandemic. So, those were also things I was thinking about," he says. Kulavoor builds on this dysfunctional idea in another large work titled The Migrants Have Left, the last one he created, with stairways that lead to nowhere and windows that cannot give you a glimpse of the sky.

Kulavoor's process of painting was fuelled with pauses - sometimes this meant stepping away from the canvas for a good 15 to 20 days. "But when you chance upon a rhythm, you hold on to it," he says, adding, "It opens floodgates to a lot of different approaches; I revisited watercolours after a long time. So in that sense, painting was therapeutic, too." And as a tumultuous year draws to a close, this show can be that mirror you needed to look into - for time lost and hope gained.

On: December 3 to January 7, 11 am to 6.30 pm (Tuesday to Saturday; entry by prior appointment only)
At: TARQ, Dhanraj Mahal, Apollo Bunder, Colaba.

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