The Modernism Man

This project was part of 409 Ramkinkars, an exhibition of sculptural installation by Vivan Sundaram. For this work I was looking at the iconic figure of the artist which is generated over a period of time through art writing and various other means. I deconstructed the catalogue of Ramkinker Baij's retrospective exhibition which was written by Shivkumar and published by Delhi Art Gallery. In this work I was majorly looking at the relationship of the artist and model which has a prominent history in western art and Ramkinker as a poineer of modern Indian art. I was looking at the multiple gazes which comes into action, the gaze of the artist against the model, models counter gaze and in the end how an art critiques gaze then frames the artist into a particular framework.

The work had a desk on which I was making all the collages in that same space and I was pasting them on the wall behind. I unbounded the fat book and took out pages to make collages out of it playing with the images and texts. The process of deconstructing the book was of more significance to me than the final outcome itself. By doing this I wanted to generate a dialogue around the iconic and masculine modern artist figure which is created over time.