TOGETHER
APART

Curated by LAND (Learning through Arts, Narrative and Discourse)
Supported by Prodapt
Exhibition Design by Namrata Arjun
Photography by Anuj Arora
Publication Design by Studio Anugraha

As Prodapt celebrated its silver jubilee—a milestone in its landmark journey of 25 years—the exhibition, Together apart, became a homage to the interventions created and led by the company. Like the stone markers flanking a long route to the destination, it recorded and memorialised the force underlying this milestone, also envisioning a comprehensive sight of the road ahead. As an organisation with a commitment to humanistic values, to actively nurture them, Prodapt’s journey and mission have been of positively influencing how the world experiences connections.

featuring works by Vikrant Kano

It was with, and in favour of, this spirit of connectedness that the idea of the exhibition was born, sustained, and executed. With connection breathing squarely at the core of the exhibition, Prodapt joined hands and hearts with artful thinking through visual and conceptual intersections, curating for its members and community an ever-evolving canvas of life’s collective contours. More than five hundred works of art from across India were explored to dive deep into the subelements of the foundational element of connection. How does art-led thinking catalyse our dialogue with the everyday, the environment, the different disciplines of thought and practice, and the time plane stretching from the past to the future? Through these artworks, we have tried to nuance—by inquiring, observing, and expanding—the ideas Prodapt is productively invested in. The exhibition features a wide variety of media. Here, there is the overarching acknowledgement of being together a part [of a connected whole], and woven together are narratives that can be followed sequentially in the physical space or through thematic connections across materials, processes, or subject considerations, which span different floors and rooms.

featuring Rashid Rana and Shilpa Gupta

Take, for instance, Rashid Rana’s Picture (im)Perfect, on the limitations of digital representation, which is displayed alongside works like Shailesh BR’s Page Turner and Shilpa Gupta’s There Is No Border Here—the two, similarly, questioning the constraints of language, man-made borders, and mechanical systems. When viewed-observed-followed alongside Yamini Nayar’s Full Circle, which is housed elsewhere, this dialogic chain evolves into a comparative exploration. In Nayar’s work, photography is used not to document external reality but to express an inner one—one shaped by intuition and memories of the hand. While Rana distorts digital information through software schemes, Nayar translates subconscious movements into tangible form through a blend of sculpture and photography. Nayar’s work, then, also converses with that of Ritesh Meshram, whose sculptures channel intuition and memory into physical space, as if to remind us that memories have bodies. After all, connections are not linear one-to-next chains. Connections have roots and branches. Connections have bodies.