Bringing art to where you are, Quiet Art Movement hosts its fourth episode of Strangr Kala at our barasti. As the season turns and across cultures we sit in memory of the dead, five artists come together to dialogue with each other and the idea of the afterlife, death, the violence of loss and grief, and how, if ever, we can heal from it.
Come by for a chat with akshit and virendra over the first weekend, or anytime after for a dekho.
• To Gujarat-based printmaker, Akbar Ali Sunasara, death is what violence leaves behind. Sunasara’s etchings employ the skull to articulate the violence of war, exploitation and its effects on a young child’s mind.
• In multidisciplinary artist Abin Sreedharan’s works, measuring instruments (inspired by early craniometry tools) in skulls observe how even in death we are measured and sorted. Based in Baroda, Sreedharan works in sculpture and painting.
• Akshit Satyarthi starts painting his interior most life, and then his paintbrush moves outward slowly; to his room, his friends, the rest of his life and the world around. ‘Riding on Death’ (in the invite above) is Satyarthi’s mediation on an early life anxious attraction to death and his attempts to face it head on, to rise above it.
•In the historic town of Belagavi, Aryama Pal looks closely at memory and forgotten stories. The artist’s childhood in the biodiverse Dooars inform his exploration of death that remains after a thing is gone. In ‘The Fish That Died as a Bird in an Aquarium’, a fish dreams of becoming a bird in its afterlife.
• Virendra Maurya, from Mirzapur, grew up amongst farmers, and his land runs through his work. ‘Patharkhura 2’ dialogues with Maurya’s village and the village folk who are promised change, but remain stuck in the same cycles of systemic underdevelopment. ‘Hello 2’ follows migrant workers who embarked on treacherous journeys home during the COVID lockdown. In both, bodies break apart to reveal a fear that sits underneath.
Artwork in the creative: Riding on Death by Akshit Satyarthi.
Conceived as a support system for artists, QAM has has grown into a community that develops together, and in doing so, shapes how artists interact, critique, collaborate and curate each other.
