‘Excrescence’ at the Mumbai based Guild Art

‘Excrescence’ at the Mumbai based Guild Art, features works by Ashutosh Bhardwaj, Sheba Chhachhi, Han Bing, Prajakata Potnis, Tusar Joag, Wu Gaozhaong are on view.

It features a wide array of works by Indian and Chinese artists - Ashutosh Bhardwaj (painting), Sheba Chhachhi (interactive video installation), HAN Bing (photography), Tushar Joag (drawing and installation), Prajakta Potnis (photography and site-specific installation) and WU Gaozhong (photography).

A press release to the show curated by Maya Kóvskaya mentions: "As such, the world often seems to be governed by huge, vast processes that are far more powerful than human design, or beyond the scope of human action. Philosopher Hannah Arendt discusses this problem extensively, for she believed that the widespread sense of alienation from our own agency comes in part from the consequences of thinking of the world as shaped by such putatively autonomous processes that are governed by an irresistible internal logic (such as capitalism) that seems to sweep away our ability to exert control over our world, our lives, and at times, even our minds. She refers to this conceptual trap in terms such as ‘autonomy of the process’, and she rightly identifies it as a fiction.

It is a powerful fiction, however, that has become (and has been for quite some time) a core strand woven into the dominant narratives of contemporary political, economic, cultural and social life of our time -the idea that there are ‘forces out there’ that push and pull us this way and that and are essentially are beyond our control.

The works come at the pressing set of issues from a variety of angles, either meditating on, or reflecting; instantiating, or performatively embodying; either critiquing or deconstructing some of the metaphorical leitmotifs of this mode of thinking and the coded cultural memes and signifiers of these kinds of anxieties - viral spread, cancerous metastasis, uncontrollable (unpredictable) mutation, invasive toxicity, entropic degeneration and decay (a sort of excrescent anti-growth, if you will), and so forth, asking us to consider the way these metaphors shape our own gazes and transform the ways we see ourselves and the workings of the world we actually participate in making through our speech, actions and practices of everyday life.

Unlike the conventional circulation of such metaphors in the mass media and our popular culture, however, their invocation in these works of art prods us to examine the underlying anxieties and processes—from which we often feel alienated or by which we may feel acted upon—from a critical distance offered in the space of the artworks themselves.

And in this space of critical distance, perhaps, by deconstructing the workings of such metaphors we may reconnect with our own agency and see these processes not in terms of overwhelming “hand of God” variables, but as products of the arrangements we humanly create, perpetuate and reproduce through our speech and action, practices and institutions."