Booth 104
In the Hero’s Journey, Joseph Campbell contends that a hero – “someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself” – shares an essential pattern of spirit, adventure and transformation across cultures and mythologies. The hero must trespass reality to yield what lies beyond it, sustaining a part of their journey through liminal conjuring, often characterized by situations of indeterminacy or ambiguity that bolster the possibility of change. The Light Side of the Moon is a compelling curation of painting and sculpture by Indian artists across generations – including Rameshwar Broota, Balkrishna Doshi, Atul Dodiya, Shilpa Gupta, N.S. Harsha, Praneet Soi and Shailesh B.R. – who assert the fecundity of the individual to precipitate self-awareness through a tenacious pursuit of provocation and encounter, so descriptive of the mood of the moment. Without the hybridity of contradiction book-ending a profound experience, notable through the discursive, twilit overtones in these works that appear to cradle both the light and the dark, the inner revolution in question cannot fruitfully take place for the journey itself becomes ineffectual. In other words, to be found, one must first lose themselves and willingly make the excursion there and back again, all while navigating cognitive thresholds through insight and perception. This special collection of works assents to the culturally epitomized quarrel of light and dark, but refreshes myth as an expression of unconsciousness processes in the mind through a persuasive and atmospheric presentation of abstract expressionism and conceptual visual languages currently evolving in the Indian Subcontinent.
