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Deities from the No Man’s Land

Prajakta Palav’s new set of paintings deals with a different urban reality in which the sacred and profane get mixed up. Subhalakshmi Shukla visits the show presented at the Kitab Mahal, Mumbai and comes up with the following observations:

Prajakta’s ongoing solo-show of selected nine paintings is about the revelations of this city’s dialectics of the manual work.

On the one hand the paintings are large composing the monumental and small details simultaneously, while one the other hand there are few others which are fairly small and squarish in size. Both the scales prefer to show-case varied subject interests. Here the context of the ‘real’ and what appears to be photographic becomes audible in complex and simplified ways respectively.

It is important to note that the process of work includes sourcing images from the photographs and transforming their linguistic syntax. For instance, a segment of the existing city map may be inverted to form a ceiling of a ‘Shamiyana’ eventually designed through the motifs of cramped-up cars rather than the original picture which shows ‘encroached’ land- (which would be soon reclaimed by/for residential housing).The three sides of the shamiyana entrance, however, remains a conventionally accepted design form of on the cloth-material that surrounds the ‘Ganesha-Pandals’. The space for the Ganesha’s icon is deliberately kept empty. Thus, the chaotic movement of the cars on the city roads forms a pattern that appears to be synchronic in some way with that of the clichéd-cloth-design. Yet, the differences upfront as chaos and disorder in clear terms within this juxtaposition. It emphasizes the fact that what appears to be chaotic is yet organized with a sense of direction and movement whereas the one which appears to be a systematically arranged design is nothing but a symmetrical order, and is stagnated.             

Paintings

I : Prajakta, in her attempts, is able to bring about a combined detail of open and enclosed spaces within the same visual to continue with the complexity of co-ordinations between two adjacent walls where a book shelf meets the green curtain, followed by the displayed art work of the garbage on the wall.

In her works light plays a very important role to show the presence of the camera, (suggesting a conscious observation rather than picturesque); objects do glitter for a fraction of moment with the flashing lights on them!

In her earlier works she has been preoccupied with the urban landscapes where the urban-waste as well as the ‘middle-class’ cluttered corners of a home could bring about a contact between what appears to be disorderly within and an ‘interior’ and what is chaotic in urban- open- space.

II: The present suite of paintings, however, is composed upon the movement governed in a city-space as guided by the human hands. The most important work displays the well staged booted feet that transform all the human activity into a design of garbage as the central rib of the shoes, (the painting cut across by a row of news papers); and the guided activities through hands writing small-chits of paper, that drive the movement of the feet back and forth. It is interesting to note that the sense of ‘erotic’ in the writing gestures of hands appears to be hidden and deceptive in the dark corners, indulging into mechanism that may appear to be meaningless and yet confirm the ‘real’ around the city fabric.

It brings along varied kinds of objects and materials as put together with the manual activity that creates those orders as a flashing significant glimpse. A narrative of the significant and yet the deceptive, displacing all that appears to be flashy in the daily news papers.

The suite of small works is however composed of zoomed up objects and that surround the everyday living.