Inspired from the wall text installation of Shilpi Rajan's show curated by Aazhi Archives at the Uru Art Harbour in Mattancherry, Fort Kochi, this graphic was developed to suggest foraying our entry into a new year of precarity.
As Dhruv tried to install the vinyl text onto the freshly dried white painted wall of the recently acquired space of Uru Art Harbour, the surface and the text behaved rather unruly producing an even geography of pasts and presents. Sitting uncomfortably, each layer seemed equally precarious, struggling to exist and yet not.
The next morning, Dhruv and his team came up with a unique way to repair the introduction wall text. The older letters were removed, the wall was repainted, the vinyl text was reprinted. Yet, the problem persisted. This time, they printed out missing parts of the text on white paper and patched it up onto the wall with glue. The recalcitrant moisture in the walls, the peeling paint and the rough surface - all struggled to support each other. Could this be what we might understand as the essential difficulty of co-existence?
The resultant aesthetic, probably resonant with Shilpi's own trajectory, played a persistent poetry of fracture. Simultaneously suggesting a fracture of language, art and the world, this emergent expression of the wall text framed a metaphorical prelude to the show, that itself was placed in a broader thematic of art in the age of precarity.
With appendages, supplements, affixtures, work still goes on. Yet, this is not to valorize precarity of infrastructure or delay as design. This is to highlight how fugitive feelings of materials can produce fractures that cannot be mended easily, and perhaps there are longer histories that need to be addressed while curating for art in the age of precarity.
Look at the images of Shilpi Rajan's show here.
