Jhaveri Contemporary returns to Frieze London with a presentation that explores, across painting, sculpture, textiles, and photography, themes connected to religious and spiritual practice. Inspired by the title and subject of Afterlife—Vasantha Yogananthan's photographic project anchored in ideas around death, loss, reincarnation—the stand brings together works that speak of transformation and the potential to explore alternative dimensions. Portals, idols, ritual and Tantra are among the tools and strategies at work here.
Mahirwan Mamtani was affiliated with the Neo Tantric group, a loose affiliation of artists from the 70s and 80s who mined the iconographic lexicon of Tantra. The visual borrowings of this group provided a conceptual framework for an abstraction rooted in Indian tradition. Through his identification and engagement with Constructivism, Mamtani developed Centrovision: 'I started experimenting with the geometrical Mandala form, and then ultimately four-petal circles construction became my symbol of expression. For me it represented wholeness.'
Drawn from an eight-year-long photographic project that retraces the Ramayana through contemporary India, the images in Vasantha Yogananthan's Afterlife are a visual response to the bloody war between the armies of Rama and Ravana. Although the pictures are shot in Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu over two editions of Dussehra—the Indian festival celebrating the victory of good over evil—they do not document the festivities. They focus instead on trance and transcendence. Shot at night, and with a vivid palette—deep reds, deep blues, deep black—Yogananthan's characters appear mystical, occupying a space between reality and dream.
Referring to her ongoing practice as 'geometry in nature', Amina Ahmed explores the relationships between line and form, shadow and substance, lightness and darkness through multimedia drawings. Ahmed draws froma range of philosophical practices, calling attention to the transformations of meaning that take place when a mark moves from a solid form to reflected or shadow states. The deftly named Pitch Prieta, a series of etchings on carbon paper ricochets off a triple meaning of 'pitch': the tar-like substance behind the adjectival 'pitch' black; a measure of inter-line or inter-dot spacing in industrial printing; and the rate of vibrations impacting the quality of a sound. In the series, the artist etches repetitive marks into the front of the carbon- coated paper, inverting the normal process whereby a printmaker would etch from the reverse side.
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran's figurative sculptures in ceramic draw upon the history of sculpture across time and geography and to ideas linked to the body. His colourful, eclectic, and at times totemic sculptures are often heavily influenced my Hinduism. There's a disquieting darkness to them, but they are also playful on account of their colour palette. 'In addition to guardians, deities, idols, and effigies, I often conceive of my work as avatars'—says Nithiyendran. 'I'm interested in the notion of the avatar across languages and discourses, up to the present day. According to Hindu scripts, 'avatar' is a term referring to a manifestation of a deity. It could also reflect a divine bodily form on Earth, with spiritual or pedagogical functions.'
Matthew Krishanu's works circle back to his early childhood spent in Dhaka where his parents moved in order to work for the Church of Bangladesh. In his House of God series, Krishanu paints areas of flattened space, rendered in layers of one particular colour, with half-remembered figures and places that are pushed towards the edges of the painting. The 'subject matter' of this series, the churches, towers and crosses, is very literally at the margins.The ground beneath each building forms a thin, hard edge, below which subject matter dissolves, often echoing the watery landscapes of Bangladesh.
Primal systems, subaltern religiosity, and folk iconography from Bengal are at the heart of Sayan Chanda's practice. He works with textiles, ceramics, and found materials of personal resonance such as used Kantha quilts, deconstructing, knotting, folding, embroidering, and weaving them into objects, reliefs, and tapestries. On view at Frieze is a large hand-woven tapestry, Thunderbolt Door. 'An anionic representation of my own mythologies, specific memories and anxieties, the tapestry is, in equal parts, a totem, votive and a portal'—says Chanda. 'The title is taken from an Oriya incantation and an invocation to an ancient folk Goddess. The spell is intended to seal the four cardinal directions of a particular site or person from malevolent forces. The slits in the tapestry also allude to the movable louvred windows of my childhood home in Kolkata, where I would spend most of my time.'
Indra's Net: Muhanned Cader IN02
Engaged with traditional modes of landscape painting, Sri Lankan artist Muhanned Cader approaches this timeless medium with experimentation, interrogation and poesy. Based in the southern, coastal town of Galle, Cader belongs to a generation of artists—known art historically as the '90's Trend—who witnessed Sri Lanka's Civil War from 1983 to 2009 through a critical lens. His practice, although not overtly activist in nature, subtly questions the extractive capitalism of Sri Lanka's current government. Looking to the inland forests and the southern Indian Ocean for inspiration, Cader's collages, drawings and paintings abstract these sites through their unique shapes and perspectival vignettes. Playing with the relationship of part to whole, Cader's works are cinematic in nature. For Frieze London, Cader uses author Leonard Woolf's book, The Village in the Jungle (1913), as a catalyst and situates his suite of artworks in the rocky, forested Yala National Park, which continues to be threatened by overdevelopment.
—Sandhini Poddar, Curator, Indra's Net.