The fault lines of our society drive a sensitive young artist’s practice

His art education at the two key sites of the ‘narrative – figurative’ revival in context of contemporary Indian art, - Trivandrum, where he did his graduation, and Baroda, where he did his Masters, - had had a significant impact on his work, each imparting its own specificities to his conceptions of art.

On the eve of Sathyanand Mohanh’s upcoming art show at The Guild India in Mumbai, here’s a quick look at this practice, processes and his evolution as an artist thus far:

• Born in Kerala, 1975, he did his BFA in Painting from The Government College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum; MFA in Printmaking from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Ms University Baroda. As he puts it: “The influence of the ‘Radical” movement (a far-left artists collective), although on the decline, was still keenly felt during my time at Trivandrum. They foregrounded an interventionist praxis which drew in equal measure from the European avant-garde as well as the various revolutionary political movements happening in Kerala at the time.
  
  
• His relocation to Baroda for the post-graduation tossed him into the midst of a waning cultural ferment that had been engaged in the task of articulating, through a narrative language that drew upon a variety of sources, a type of Indian Modernism; that had the conceptual and visual apparatus to address both local and global concerns sans becoming yet another exotic commodity in the world-market of ideas.
  
  
• From these encounters with different trajectories and approaches to art making, he has tried to evolve a visual language marked by the critical dialogue with tradition that constitutes a historically grounded practice. He is interested in the way that history operates through the minutiae of everyday life and of the ways in which it permeates its spaces.
  
  
• He has also been intrigued by Jurgen Habermas’ well-known formulation about the “incomplete project of Modernity” that seems to him to be particularly apt with regard to nations such as ours, - poised to become an economic superpower, yet more often than not unable to provide for the vast majority of its citizenry the social, economic and political stabilities that the passage through Modernity is supposed to guarantee. These contradictions that exist and constitute the fault lines of our society are a further consideration that insinuates itself into his works.