200 CM from Your Shadow
Biraaj Dodiya and Shilpa Gupta at the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, December 2023
“Mumbai-based artists Shilpa Gupta and Biraaj Dodiya employ practices rooted in conceptualism and abstraction respectively to acknowledge absent narratives in the mainstream cultural imagination, while actively engaging with the integrity and deconstruction of structures and material. Their explorations are centered around understanding the varied forces that establish the world-at-large and unfold within them. By looking at individualism as a language of existence – or what is – and possibility – or what could be – they discover expressions of alternative realities. Living in a post-truth era, where narratives of identity are charged by a spectrum or flux as opposed to rigid definitions, perceptions of individual and collective events are enhanced by their repressed aspects, including their fears, faults and fractures.”
The sculpture Rising, makes reference to a sarcophagus, a plinth, a monolith form. This minimalist structure (monochrome, oil paint on steel) is reminiscent of resurrection paintings, a recurring subject in art history (European pre-renaissance and renaissance painting), centering a figure and a tomb. Showing the work in Goa references the context of its European colonial past, the architectural monuments and the Catholic presence. Traditionally this is an image of emergence and miracle, of a ‘coming back to life’. As I think of mortality, conflict and violence in the contemporary moment, this ‘empty tomb’ becomes an elegy for reflection and the passing of time.
Connecting ground and sky, a singular, mournful flag in the distance.