“Current” reviewed in Deccan Herald

…”Sreshta Premnath’s ‘Infinite Threat, Infinite Regress’ passes on to the socio-political plane, though addressed to individuals. Manipulated, multiplied and enhanced images from a Bruce Lee film have the hero facing an invisible adversary in a chamber of mirrors. The effect is of high but confused, self-imposed or rather state-imposed alertness and fear, which becomes underscored by the TV monitor displaying an apparently clear, yet practically useless abstract graph, with the official estimate of terrorist threat in the US. ”

Aug 10 2008 – Marta Jakimowicz

Disturbing flow

Current at Galleryske (July 21 to August 25) is an interesting exhibition conceptualised by Nivedita Magar, who invited four young artists associated with the institution to respond to widely understood manifestations of this idea in life. Each contribution revolving around different aspects is distinct and many-layered while at some levels interconnecting with the rest and adding to a tight as well as complex whole.

Fleshed out in very contemporary idioms, it indeed offers insights into the forceful, if disrupted, permeable and often disturbing rhythms, directions and changes that underlie our reality. Entering the gallery one is struck by the blinding, disorienting lights of Avinash Veeraraghavan’s installation with a body of cables and chaotically flashing, naked bulbs which evoke being ‘Lost in Traffic’. From a ‘literal’ link to electricity, in ‘Total Internal Recall’, the artist moves to the digital mediums of video and print and reflection on the process of perception moulding.

The jerky superimpositions on a human face of commercial, real and television images; flower patterns and anatomy illustrations conjure a random aggressiveness of simultaneous, permeable impact, passively absorbed but transformed into a torrent of moods both unnerving and poetic. ‘Some Beast’ by Sakshi Gupta is among the most spectacular as well as touching sculpture here. Her immense fan, pieced of scrap iron, suspended from the ceiling seems to be turning, coming down and disintegrating. Shedding its rusty mechanical skin, it is metamorphosing into animal or plant forms, as the artist sees stirring lightness in massive immobility, brute power in filigree brittleness, domesticity in the industrial and lyricism in the ordinary.

The personal angle of those two artists in Sreshta Premnath’s ‘Infinite Threat, Infinite Regress’ passes on to the socio-political plane, though addressed to individuals. Manipulated, multiplied and enhanced images from a Bruce Lee film have the hero facing an invisible adversary in a chamber of mirrors. The effect is of high but confused, self-imposed or rather state-imposed alertness and fear, which becomes underscored by the TV monitor displaying an apparently clear, yet practically useless abstract graph, with the official estimate of terrorist threat in the US.

A wonderful part of the exhibition belongs to Minam Apang who in an intimate way approaches the pulses, transformations and bridges between an ancient landscape and modern life, between the organic and human worlds, between the mythic tradition present paths of imagery-forming or story-telling.

Her sculptural drawing-painting “Because I often need to be reminded…” captures roughness and finesse, naïve innocence and bawdy as well as aware modes over a graphic-painterly separateness-pervasiveness of motifs from classic and today’s imageries, from art and writing-scribbling, nearly abstract areas evoking natural energies.