namrata arjun

Playing God
16 x 20 inches
Oil on Wood Panel

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The paintings in the series Playing God (2020) deal with the personal viewpoint as a formal device. Formulating a painterly language that queers time and posits it as non-linear and layered, my practice challenges the gender binary, by articulating my misrecognition within rigidly gendered historical/familial photographic archives, as a way to re-frame larger issues around minority rights, representation, and the filtering of the political through the intimate, familial and personal, and dialogue with the (colonial) histories of painting and photography in India. The logic of the sacred gesture or mudra or attention to holding and care is employed to dismantle the operation of a subject-object binary, and assume a critical distance from euphoric or nostalgic recall. The paintings seek to prise open and examine memory and mythology as performative and constructed actions or verbs.