‘Sharpnel’ at Latitude 28

An exhibition of works by Veer Munshi, entitled ‘Sharpnel’ takes place courtesy Latitude 28 and foundation b&g.

The series consists of 3 recent bodies of work - ‘The Chamber’ is a suite of photographs titled ‘Pandit Houses’, and a two-channel video work, ‘Leaves like Hands of Flame’. Ranjit Hoskote, curator of the exhibition, mentions: “In ‘Shrapnel’, the artist adopts the elegist’s chosen forms: the memorial and the archive. These forms allow him to shift the focus from the image to the conditions that make the image possible, or even inevitable.”

‘The Chamber’ has evolved organically from his paintings about the distortion of everyday life through civil strife, terror and endemic violence, simulates a conflict zone. Entering it, we find every movement timed with an explosion, every moment sharpened by the agitator’s call to arms.

And in the ongoing photographic archive that Munshi has built up, ‘Pandit Houses’, he presents, for the first time, an invisible side of the Kashmir story: the homes abandoned by Pandits fleeing into exile, which have fallen into ruin, been reclaimed for use by neighbours or requisitioned by the armed forces.

As the curator reveals: “Each image in ‘Pandit Houses’ is stark, plain-spoken, without embellishment. There is no annotative manipulation, no theatricality, no melodrama. There they stand, in our line of sight: ruins, monuments, memorials. This is testimony to the unforgiving march of history, which takes no prisoners.”

‘Leaves like Hands of Flame’ (running time 5 min 3 sec) is a two-channel video meditation. Its title comes from a line in a poem by Ranjit Hoskote, which speaks of the chinar. Through one channel, which remains deceptively static, Munshi runs an animation sequence that tracks the gradual burning-down of a grand old mansion from his ‘Pandit Houses’ archive. Through the second channel, the artist records his journey by boat and on foot through an embattled Kashmiri winter landscape of fallen leaves, swirling water and falling snow.

The publisher of foundation b&g, Harsha Bhatkal, asserts: “We believe that art can and should play a constructive role in a civilised society. We will be happy if ‘Shrapnel’ plays even a small part in this direction.