‘Anatomy of Silence’ at The Guild Art Gallery

‘Anatomy of Silence’ is the third solo show of artist Rakhi Peswani with the Mumbai-based Guild Gallery, the second one as part of ART HK. 

Taking a cue from her earlier artworks (‘Matters under the Skin’, and ‘Intertwinings’) coupled with a sustained and deep engagement with the psychological dimensions of ‘Thinking through Craft’, the new series assess the particular zones of comfort and stability. They try to re-present the inherent character that is latent within such spaces.

The relationship between hand crafts and the status of the maker in urban society is explored in the new body of works. A press release states that ‘Silence’, in its very narrow sense is often seen as a state of being mute or silent, an aspect integral to the languages of painting, sculpture and object making. The artwork, or the cultural object, in this context, tends to hold a ‘mute’ relationship with the society it survives in. And in this sense, object making as a form of art is essentially a language dealing with this aspect of silence and initiates a discourse from there.

“In its broader usage, the essay elaborates: “The new series refers to the state of being in oblivion or silenced through omission or non-mention. In this sense, the show explores certain trajectories through the choices of materials and processes that become mute reminders of certain segments of our society that seem to be at neglect. Materiality becomes a quiet reminder and is juxtaposed with textual and visual quotations, bringing the critical nature of art and literature closer to the spatial field of the viewer; to locate a close relationship between process based practices and literature. Literary thought is transported into architectural spaces, inhabiting the physical reality of the viewer.

Spaces of stability and comfort- a house/home/room/bed are deconstructed and re-presented as replete with other forms of temporal and ephemeral intensities. Subtractive and additive processes are juxtaposed with spatial languages of intimacy and immersion to understand other relationships that stability and comfort ought to have. These processes hold themselves as metaphors to understand the qualities of destruction and restoration that are intrinsic to craft practices, otherwise seen as fixed and timeless in their skills and expressions. Fiber, fabric, literature and spatial languages become dissecting tools to disclose the reticence of the handmade today.”