Artville Contemporary Artist Of The Day
Reena Saini Kallat
Title: Synonym
Year: 2007
Medium: Acrylic paint, rubberstamps, plexiglass
Size: 195 x 134 cm
The work stands like a screen, holding up a portrait formed by several hundred names of people, rendered in scripts of over 14 Indian languages. From a distance they come together as a portrait, but up-close they almost seem like a circuit-board of rubberstamps. The rubberstamps are made with names of those officially registered as having gone missing in India from different geographical zones. These include the names of those lost through natural calamities such as landslides, floods and earthquakes, the names of those who have gone missing during riots or large scale mishaps and the names of those abducted or absconding, with the police still trying to ascertain their whereabouts. These are people who seem to have slipped out of the radar of human communication, who have been thrown off the social safety net. The portrait of a sub-continental citizen is formed by numerous such names; the back of the portrait emerges as a sea of invisible identities, a bird’s eye view of a large human congregation
Her practice – spanning painting, photography, video, sculpture and installation, often incorporates multiple mediums into a single work. She frequently works with officially recorded or registered names of people, objects, and monuments that are lost or have disappeared without a trace, only to get listed as anonymous and forgotten statistics. One of the recurrent motifs in her work is the rubber stamp, used as an object and an imprint, signifying the bureaucratic apparatus, which both confirms and obscures identities.
#art #rubberstamps #portrait #newmedia #popularart #contemporaryartist#reenasainakallat #artvillecontemporary #artgallery
No comments:
Post a Comment