For Frieze, our booth de-centers the axis of a revolution as it unfolds. At the edge of upheaval, viewers encounter a web of protagonists, armatures, materials, apparitions — each tethered to a landscape at peril, to an identity displaced, unmoored, and silenced.
Out here, shadows begin to speak: Poulomi Basu’s photographs capture the battlegrounds of revolts led by indigenous tribal communities in Central India, specifically female rebels against the violence of the State. In contrast, Munem Wasif’s abandoned landscapes punctuate the space with an eerie silence, as he photographs no man's land scarred terrain at the border drawn to partition Bangladesh and India. But what if the land itself revolts, and begins to erupt? Caught between fault lines, Goutam Ghosh’s installation comprises terracotta sculptures — resembling exhumed artefacts — and a large hieroglyphic painting on cotton textile. A threadbare palimpsest, Ghosh’s ciphers awaken the materiality of fossilised remnants, charged with the historicity of thousands of years.
If Ghosh’s minimal works subtract our horizon of seeing, then Anupam Roy’s immersive painting — on make-shift tarpaulin — explodes with hypnotic, striking colour. Landscape spills into language, forming an unstable aggregate that resists the singular narrative of a colonizer. Out here, terrain develops textures of memory, desire and political history while Roy’s protagonists find themselves in limbo, held captive by the uncertain conditions of a phantom prison. Amidst this tumultuous landscape, Anpu Varkey’s paintings pierce through colour saturated lands and into the subjectivity of their inhabitants, unravelling the inner contours of an emotional landscape, the makings of memory itself.
One encounters Amol K Patil’s wounded bronze figures fossilised in the detritus of labour — the dust they sweep swallowing them whole while only their innermost wills persist. Nearby, Srinath Iswaran’s silver gelatin print is a photographic record of unseen labour, touch and force captured in the arrangement of photosensitive chemicals through a press, a roll or a brush.
