A new group show at Berlin based Nature Morte

‘Treacherous Path’, an exhibition at Berlin based Nature Morte, features a site-specific project by Julia Staszak, as well as installations by Raqs Media Collective and Radhika Khimji.
It focuses on different artistic methods of collage, layering and appropriation.

The centerpoint of Julia Staszak's installation is a structure derived from the facades of Hindu temples in South India, which incorporates works by diverse artists. Blurring the lines between conceptual art, painting, decor, collage and curating, the painter often integrates her own paintings, other artists' work and found objects into original and unfamiliar configurations. Her penchant for toying with political correctness becomes particularly poignant because it complicates the cultural expectations involved in such an invitation.

In the past few years the Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabratta Sengupta) have become increasingly visible on Europe's cultural platforms, participating in museum and gallery exhibitions as well as academic forums and symposiums. Their sculptural work, ‘The Reserve Army’, appropriates the Modernist sculptures made by the Indian sculptor Ram Kinker Baij, who appropriated Yaksha and Yakshi, two mythological Indian figures, to grant legitimacy to the newly independent nation, while Raqs' re-presentation of these figures speaks of India's convoluted entry into the world of advanced, multi-national capital.

With the addition of accessories for the figures, a digitized, futuristic backdrop and dramatic lighting, Raqs Collective employs a theatrical mise-en-scene to manipulate meaning, similar to the program of Julia Staszak.
Last but not the least, Radhika Khimji’s multi-media works create an unstable constellation of reactions between gesture, drawing, negative space, and architecture. Created for the exhibition ‘Progress Reports: art in an era of diversity’ at INIVA in London in 2009, her ‘Corner’ articulates the subtle shifts between an object and its support, the frame and its boundaries, an abstract motif and the representational meanings we project on to it.