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Studio 2 : Stress and The Mind in Conflict
Where silence once sheltered the self, that same privacy is now forced into the open. The figure has always borne witness to rupture. In these works, the body becomes a site where external forces like violence, power, and history leave their mark, visible or otherwise. Form is pushed to its breaking point: distorted, fragmented, sometimes barely holding together. Yet within this damage lies testimony. The artists here do not simply depict conflict; they ask the body to carry it, to register what words cannot. What results is neither documentary nor abstraction, but something closer to evidence, a reminder that the figure, however battered, remains a vessel for memory, resistance, and survival.
Utkarsh Shakya finds quiet tension in the everyday, Divided Priorities setting a bride's photograph against a child's drifting attention, a small, telling fracture within celebration. Anju Dodiya displays a performance in Studio Guests, an expression of suffering in her identity as an artist, stilled in gestures of madness. Jitish Kallat’s Traumanama (The Cry Of The Gland) uses mutant, carcass-like humanoid forms to metaphorically represent the physiological and psychological trauma of urban living. The bodies appear under strain, overlaid with imagery of dystopian cityscapes, collision, and urban decay.
Ayushi Patni approaches the mind as a landscape in continual formation. Between the microscopic and the immeasurable, Neuromicrograph 0.04 invites a movement between looking closely and stepping back, between the fragment and the whole. Khadim Ali’s Evacuation 22 - I and Evacuation 22 - II answer the 2021 withdrawal of international forces from Afghanistan with two mythical creatures moving in opposite directions. Symbols of wisdom and compassion become carriers of fear and abandonment, leaving those who inherited these stories caught between arrival and departure.
T. V. Santhosh’s Untitled places a stark skull against a blurred, almost dreamlike background, turning a familiar image of death into a meditation on violence and its aftermath. T. Venkanna’s Death of Venus reimagines Botticelli’s Birth of Venus as a world of smoke, ash and skeletal figures, draining the original of its colour and beauty. Baaraan Ijlal archives fragile buildings and displaced lives against erasure, Between Dusk and Dawn: Women, Land and Borders bearing witness to land, memory, and the women who inhabit its margins.
