Aditi Pande - the only female and non-Malayali artist in ‘Cold Blast’

Among the participating artists in a new group show, entitled ‘Cold Blast’ at Kochi based Chaithanya Art Gallery, Aditi Pande is the only female artist and the only non--Malayali artist.

She deftly her status as an 'Indian contemporary' artist through playing around with the subtle nuances of two 'localities' in her works. reveals curator Johny ML. Though, she does not stress too much on autobiographical renditions through her visuals, she takes special care to incorporate her provincial understanding of life vis-à-vis the existence of a young woman in contemporary India.

In a work titled 'Break Time', she highlights the provincial identity of her own artistic self by creating the ambience of a classroom, where the protagonist, interestingly faceless, is left alone in the midst of a young children's graffiti. In the second painting titled 'My Little Warriors', Aditi portrays herself as sleeping Gulliver surrounded by several Lilliputians.

Digging into history and mythology is an interesting act of artist Dibin Thilakan to bring out exceptionally provocative images in his works. Replete with a sense of dark humor and arrogant and irreverent images, his paintings have been hailed for their raw energy and force. Though, some of the works carry the signs of an 'absolute' male perspective of the world, a deeper look would reveal that he attempts are not to demean the opposite gender but to bring her presence in a provocative way to mock at the male perversions prevalent in a spectacular society, which even thrives on virtual pornography.

The dark humor in his works reveals for us a world where politics is mocked and mythology is re-articulated with the artist's surrogate as the central figure. Seen against the daily occurrences of bomb blasts and terrorist acts across the world, explosions and blasts have gained a sort of social legitimacy not only as tragedy but also as spectacle.

Explosions bring in the pictures of death and destructions. The frozen and the moving images of the affected people almost come and go before our eyes as in a dumb charade. But none cares about the series of implosions caused by these explosions. These implosions are emotional, intellectual and spiritual. A city, when reorganized by the acts of terrorism and political aggression of the state, things implode in people's mind.

(Information courtesy: Chaithanya Art Gallery, Kochi)