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Art was patronised by the church and the temple to reflect and hold the magnificence of God to the layman. Designed as a Shrine we ask you not to be drawn into divinity but reflect on how the act of an artist can hold divinity and conceptualise Godliness in sculpture and painting but also form the reason for violence. Sacred objects and architecture is a space of confrontation in South Asia. But artists such as Ayesha Singh reflect on how mosques and temples dot our skyline and she does so using simple means of welded metal that is held together by strips of painted cloth. What holds our society together? Perhaps a history of syncretic living and acceptance. The shrine and the sacred become inspirations to both art and curation as wunderkammers of objects and performance. Saloni Doshi’s many corbels from demolished homes and temples transports the space’s functional aesthetic to one that would mimic many realms and stories. Benitha Perciyal does so by recreating the history of Christian art by making her portable altars whilst S.Nandagopal uses the techniques used by lay people in rural Tamil Nadu to make village deities inexpensively to draft a vocabulary of an artisanal modernism. Laxma Goud‘s bust of a woman is placed between two corbels to form a choreography of the sacred – present only when we imagine the many absences. Seema Nusrat, an artist from Karachi in residence at Space 118 in the year 2015, made Bombay her muse during her time here. She began fashioning formless sculpture using materials used in building Bombay’s informal housing. Her sculpture in the exhibition is three large pieces of jute on which she has embroidered cowrie shells. They wrap around each other and when hung together cascade from the ceiling like a burst of thoughts. S. Sarvanan’s coloured etch plates of deities are akin to etching plates that were used to make multi-coloured viscosity prints. Printmaking and sculpture have a long history of co-dependence. Krishna Reddy left sculpting to become a sculptor when he could not afford a sculpture studio. The connection between sculpture and divinity in India is similar even in secular society; its main function is to memorialise political figures in the quest of political ideology and national making. Reverence is key as well as violent.
