'This too shall pass' by Sudarshan Shetty

The Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum presents a new show, entitled ‘This too shall Pass’ by Sudarshan Shetty.

It’s the first of a series of exhibitions planned by the Museum to re-establish its historic connection with the Sir J. J. School of Art. During the 19th and early 20th century the position of curator of the Museum and the principal of the School of Art were held by the same person. Many of the objects in it were produced by the JJ school students. The museum is a rich repository of the history & culture of the city.

The exhibition series is planned as a residency where artists respond to the Museum's collection and engage with its history and archives. The works in the series by Sudarshan Shetty engage what he refers to as "memory at large," playing on the viewer's encounters with the quotidian worlds of the city, home and street as they incorporate everyday objects, machine parts and readymades, easily available in the streets around his home and studio in Mumbai.

However, his practice takes these origins as points of departure for a rigorous investigation of concepts of self and nature, things and beings, effect and affect and absence and presence. Drawing on a world of shared meaning, the object-assemblage materially incorporates and disperses those shared meanings into the viewer's experience.

Sudarshan Shetty is best known for his enigmatic and moving sculptural installations has long been recognized as his generation's most innovative conceptual artist in India. Working with the mechanical animation of objects and the philosophical implications of the quest for mechanical life, he draws on a terrain that centers on the social life of things and their capacities to offer new kinds of subjective experience.

While inviting the viewer into an uncanny and seemingly occult universe of objects, this language also puzzles by embedding contradictions in the forms themselves and playfully parodying the possibility of a ‘natural' order of things and a ‘normal' order of humans as makers of meaning.