Sunday, June 13, 2010

Exploring the dark side of globalization and today’s turbulent times

The themes of violence, injustice, and inequality run through TV Santhosh’s practice. Drawing on images and news reports from the media, he combines pointed text and repetitive sculptural forms to make a statement on both the persistent nature of violence and the way it gradually becomes the norm, through recurrence.

His 'Burning Flags' at Aicon Gallery, London in collaboration with The Guild Gallery is a suite of paintings in the burning green, yellow, red, and orange hues he is identified with, also incorporating a close-up of a figure gazing at the viewer. Enmeshed quietly in the background, it starkly dominates the foreground as well.

With each work mired in the chaos and confusion of war, deliberate referencing of photographic negatives not only comments on the mediation of such frenzied events through the media, but also recreates the drama of the situations the artist is depicting. An accompanying essay to the exhibition mentions:
“The works are hallucinatory; what is it exactly being witnessed by both their protagonists and the viewers? Similarly his sculptures gesture towards destruction and waste. They use scrolling neon messages set in what seem imprisonment or torture cells in white. The usage of the neutral medium of white fiberglass directs the pieces towards Hannah Arendt's phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to suggest that most atrocities are inflicted by ordinary people rather than sociopaths.

“TV Santhosh’s watercolors underline this sense of everyday atrocities with their black & white depictions of individuals. It seems a deliberately quieter counterpoint to his work. Evil is both widespread and banal in a world where as the artist points out, utopias seem as distant as they ever have been.”
According to him, his recent works are about how the media presents the world to us and how it has the power and the means to reconstruct as well as manipulate our understanding of reality. They specifically investigate into media generated world itself.

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