‘In The Waves And Underneath’ by Pooja Iranna

"Don’t be absorbed with the waterwheel’s motion.
Turn your head and gaze at the river. You say,
'But I’m looking there already.” There are several signs
in eyes that see all the way to the ocean. Bewilderment is one.
Those who study foam and flotsam near the edge have purposes,
and they’ll explain them at length!
Those who look out to sea become the sea, and they can’t speak about that.
On the beach there’s desire-singing and rage-ranting, the elaborate language-dance of personality, but in the waves and underneath there’s no volition, no hypocrisy, just love forming and unfolding."

—Rumi

The above verse sums up the spirit of Pooja Iranna’s new show. Her exploration of the human psyche has been a long-standing one.

Curator Ina Puri’s note on nww show, entitled ‘In The Waves And Underneath’ at New Delhi based Palette Art Gallery points out how the artist recalls having witnessed, in her formative years, the ultimate submission of a generation grappling with the bewildering demands of a consumerist, modern society, their illumined hopes and dreams of the past era consigned to memory. The silhouette of the city’s skyline—once a spangle of minarets and tomes being replaced by an ugly tangle of multistoried constructions reaching up to claim the skies—also made its imprint in her conscious memory. The architectural spaces, in her work, speak of the human condition.

In the artist’s pictorial realm, images appear from past and present times, capturing her impressions of the city she calls her home, as it metamorphoses into a metascape she barely recognizes. Standing at the edge of this precipice, part-real, part-fantasy, she seems to say to the viewer, ‘Come, travel into my space and inhabit my world. Listen to the unspoken voices of the walls whispering their secrets to you…’

In Pooja Iranna’s world, there is the feeling of cosmic loneliness, the spectre of ‘an abandoned world encased in glacial solitude…’ Who is more alone? He who feels his own seclusion or he who feels the solitude of the world? In the waves and underneath, there’s no volition, no hypocrisy, just love forming and unfolding.