Consequences of war

This performance based video is one of my most recent works, that quite embodies my 6 year practice following graduation in 2016. This all encompassing work brings to the forefront my approach towards Art making as an Interdisciplinary artist who enjoys the freedom of navigating across mediums to portray my concerns as an artist/thinker; whose practice is more of an enquiry/scrutiny of the present that emanates from the past.

In this work titled “Consequences of War”, I’ve made use of a printed backdrop, as source material, of the iconic painting by Flemish Baroque painter namely Peter Paul Rubens. He painted it in response to the end of Thirty years of war and internal conflict within Europe. Struggles for political power and dominance contributed to the prolonged war, as a result of which Europe suffered tremendously at the hands of Pestilence and famine.

In the foreground, there’s a struggle going on between kids to claim possession of the inflatable black tube to sit in. The black tube and the power dynamic in play, the phenomenon of dominance of the mighty over the fragile.

This work is also a conscious attempt to rethink British Imperial history, rethink Britishness and to put the history of Browns influenced by the British into the history pot, by going back to Western Painting/Western Art history to establish my stance on British Imperialism of South Asia that has had catastrophic effects on the land and its inhabitants : It’s like inserting the brown back into History, as I perceive History not as something linear but as something that is ambiguous and amoebic, that allows for its reinterpretation in varying contexts of the present.

(From the “Still-moving image” series)

Rethinking “Brown-ness”

Rewriting history

Reconfiguring history

Inserting the colonized brown back into the history pot

The Art of Decolonization

(Original painting by Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens)