"When Violence becomes decadent"
Curator : Shaheen Merali
Installing from June 16th
Vernissage 23rd June
Open to public 24th June until the July 29th.

Artists: Sarnath Banerjee, Binu Bhaskar, Rajib Chowdhury, Samit Das, Natasha de Betak, Probir Gupta, Rajkamal Kahlon, Jitish Kallat, Leena Kejriwal, Simit Raveshia

When Violence becomes decadent, presents a series of ten works by artists living or working in contemporary India, creating an artistic discourse and notations within a turbulent history that remains entrenched in what can only be described as a nation of great ambition and much deprivation.

The installations, photographs, drawings and prints have mainly resulted by using lens-based technologies, a method used in much of the contemplation of wider problems and of ‘minority’ representation. The exhibition suggests ways that curation can become a cohesive and transparent form of research which allows an insight into and analysis of the ‘worlds largest democracy’.
The exhibition at the Freies Museum is partially based around a study of the great poet Rabindranath Tagore who was instrumental in this nation’s birth and its separation from its former colonial rulers. Some of his works and ideas formed an important history of acts of humanism, universalist and internationalist principles which helped to denounce both imperialist strictures and spurned, rigid classical forms of expression by resisting imported linguistic strictures.
In trying to examine this legacy, as a historical remain or archive established far from India’s headlong rush into super-capitalism, it becomes possible to pose a more meditative set of questions, positions rather than postures and renunciations.
As such, a great amount of the work in the exhibition considers the issues of scarcity and nationhood, from mapping the ground for the cheap and globalised labour that drives much of the rural ambition into dwelling in city squalor to constructing architectural gambles in the Middle East.