“I walked slowly, not to move very far from home”, reads a vertical ticker in the gallery.
This running text encapsulates an inexplicable charge. What does home look like in the act of walking towards it? How does it manifest through smell, touch, and other intangible indices? Could home germinate in a box around your head? In his solo exhibition Breathing, not performing, Madhu Das reflects on the slow but perceptible fragmentation of mind, body, and matter against a media landscape in perpetual flux.
In a performative intervention, the artist—dressed in industrial overalls—will be running a marker over his body for hours using a metal scale as aid. While the rigidity of the scale contends with the uneven contours of his human physique, this durational act of mark-making will engage reflection on the monotony attendant to repetition. What happens to the mind when the body is trapped in its own rhythm? It becomes numb; the body’s suspended consciousness is its defining distinction from the world around it.
Das’s works hearken to an epistemic commons, and he ties them together through both order and medium. Rendered in varying scales, his paintings appear in clusters, and are strung by material preoccupations that also carry cultural weight. One of such mediums is tarpaulin, on which he exercises many of his reactions. An industrial material largely used in vehicular transit, tarpaulin connects to mobility, time, and labour—ideas that are distilled into the leitmotif of the gumboot. The calamity is over, and people may walk back to their homes. But what if the landscape is irrevocably altered? Where does one arrive then?
In Das’s works, things are held in liminal spaces. Rods prop up a fabric sculpture in 1250 Mile, creating tension between metal and skin. A man moves through disjointed paper frames with a sound body in Act of Resistance. In another room, the absence-presence of the disruptor in a Kannada newspaper photo causes unrest. But as you move closer to peruse this unrest, a tyre with spikes stops you in your strides, pushing you away while simultaneously inviting you to read the wall against your back. In A Root on Dried Ground, a body lies supine under heavy clumps of soil—one has become the other.
Most acutely captured in the artist’s lithographs, this abeyance is conveyed through the dialogue between land and body as they exchange form, function, and wounds while also becoming sites of memory—across anatomical, archaeological, and galactic registers.
The works in this exhibition stir, scrape, and sing—evoking surreal images from the pit of political nightmares. Every stroke is an attempt to freeze what is momentary, and linear thinking is rendered inadequate. There is a palpable disquiet in this space that only mirrors the panic outside. These feet do not stray too far from home; they just take a detour.
Najrin Islam
