Rakhi Peswani: Anatomy of Silence

The Guild Art Gallery is delighted to present ‘Anatomy of Silence’, the third solo exhibition of Rakhi Peswani with The Guild, the second being at ART HK, in a solo presentation in 2011.   

“The show excavates the body in the handmade through the now crucial trope of its displacement and near demise. The relationship between laborious work and a craftsman’s body is explored and seen vis-a-vis the situation of the handmade today.

Developing further from her earlier works [Matters under the Skin (2011), Intertwinings (2009)] and a sustained engagement with the psychological dimensions of Thinking through Craft, these works assess the particular zones of stability and comfort, and attempt to re-present the inherent character latent within such spaces. The relationship between hand crafts and the status of the maker in urban society is explored in Anatomy of Silence.

‘Silence’, in its narrow sense is seen as a state of being mute or silent, an aspect that is integral to the languages of painting, sculpture and object making. The work of art, or the cultural object, in this context, holds a ‘mute’ relationship with the society it survives in. In this sense, object making as a form of art is essentially a language that deals with this aspect of silence and initiates a discourse from there.

“In its broader usage, Silence 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, which are 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.” 

Rakhi Peswani.

January 2013, 

Bangalore