Mar 02 2024 to Mar 06 2024 11 a.m.

EVENT HAS ENDED

Where

Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath

No.1, Art Complex, Kumarakrupa Rd, near The Lalit Hotel, Kumara Park East 560001

Event Description

Pragati Dalvi Jain is showcasing “Shapes of Unseen Voices” at Chitrakala Parishat from March 2nd to 6th, 2024 – 11 AM to 7PM and the show is curated by Nalini S Malaviya.

Pragati Dalvi Jain’s solo exhibition centres around her recent multidisciplinary body of works, comprising conceptual and performative photographs, sculptural and video installations, a live performance and paintings.

The conceptual works span about a decade of her art practice, and explore subjects that are personal and social, informed by politics of gender and identity. Her work emanates from, and is substantiated by research; her subjects are people who are part of our daily lives, present, yet often invisible and embodying multiple voices. Several of these are women, and at the fringes of society - on the periphery of our vision, unseen, ignored or whose identities are irrelevant from a certain vantage point. Using extensive still and moving images, Pragati draws attention to the systemic lacuna in social contexts where ‘unseeing’ is natural and part of an inured process.  The ‘othering’ of sections of society results from complexities emerging from years of conditioning and accepted norms around social, socio-economic and cultural paradigms specific to geographical and political bearings.

As a keen observer, Pragati examines facial and bodily expressions of people in public and intimate spaces and correlates them with intangible emotions reflected through body language. This has contributed towards the extension of her practice from painting to performance art around body and mind interrelationship.

One of her recent projects’ centres on FOP (Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva) and focuses on creating awareness about the rare medical disease, and its impact on both patients and their caregivers. The deeply distressing condition as it progresses, converts muscles to bones, and physically immobilizes patients to leave them bed bound.

‘Stretching My Dreams’, a series of photographs and videos emerged from conversations with Indian patients and their caregivers, probing their circumstances and aspirations, to create performative works. It re/presented their dreams as an extra-corporeal experience, where the body is confined yet thoughts, emotions and desires drift untethered.

Another project, ‘Her Remains’ which she completed last year, is a series of photographic installations. A performance-based photography work, which is deeply personal to her in a literal sense, presents a series of photographs which reflect on loss and death, and presence/absence of the body versus the memories that linger.

The conflicting notions of motherhood and its complexities and ambivalence continue in the ‘Absent Mother’, where Pragati consciously distanced herself from her two children while continuing to live under the same roof. In the month-long performance art piece, her involvement and stance altered from an active participant to a passive one of an observer.

'Can't Remember Love' is an immersive performance piece that explores love as an emotion, its layers and complexities, and its reciprocation or lack thereof. Interacting with a mannequin and attempting to elicit a response – expectation and rejection form extremities of the interaction, defining the composite nature of relationships

‘The Chase’ is a durational performative piece in collaboration with another artist, a senior textile designer Jayshree Poddar, where they both ‘walk’ in opposite directions along an infinite loop at their separate paces. The two audio channels represent the contrasting approaches to material and non-material objects – one actively voicing the chase and the other countering the popular narrative.