Objects and their Alternative Biographies
published in Art India, Jan 2018
Everyday domestic furniture is liberated from its commoditized entrapment in Sumedh Rajendran’s Water without Memory at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, from the 12th of October to the 8th of November. Doors, tables, chairs and grills take an anthropomorphic turn in Rajendran’s re-articulation as they draw inspiration from human gestures. Objects turn, melt, fold and animate themselves as if becoming conscious of their selves. Are they addressing their ontological futures, you wonder? Rajendran’s furniture pieces remind you of Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s invocation, “The door handle is the handshake of the building.” His works highlight the phenomenological by challenging our structures of experience and consciousness about everyday objects.
The contemporary urban environment is contested with constant redevelopments, slum erasures and demolitions; the artworks impress themselves upon the viewer as ‘leftovers’ of dilapidated buildings. Are these objects folding themselves in response to the harsh processes and injuries of urban transformation or do they awaken to bend within new outlines in order to reconfigure time and space? Rajendran’s artworks rethink the Cartesian utilitarianism imposed on everyday objects allowing them to write their own alternative biographies. In doing so, they provoke the viewer to reconsider her own relationship with domestic paraphernalia and the way in which it moulds and choreographs our bodies and spaces.
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published in Art India, Jan 2018
Everyday domestic furniture is liberated from its commoditized entrapment in Sumedh Rajendran’s Water without Memory at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, from the 12th of October to the 8th of November. Doors, tables, chairs and grills take an anthropomorphic turn in Rajendran’s re-articulation as they draw inspiration from human gestures. Objects turn, melt, fold and animate themselves as if becoming conscious of their selves. Are they addressing their ontological futures, you wonder? Rajendran’s furniture pieces remind you of Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s invocation, “The door handle is the handshake of the building.” His works highlight the phenomenological by challenging our structures of experience and consciousness about everyday objects.
The contemporary urban environment is contested with constant redevelopments, slum erasures and demolitions; the artworks impress themselves upon the viewer as ‘leftovers’ of dilapidated buildings. Are these objects folding themselves in response to the harsh processes and injuries of urban transformation or do they awaken to bend within new outlines in order to reconfigure time and space? Rajendran’s artworks rethink the Cartesian utilitarianism imposed on everyday objects allowing them to write their own alternative biographies. In doing so, they provoke the viewer to reconsider her own relationship with domestic paraphernalia and the way in which it moulds and choreographs our bodies and spaces.
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