| Apocalyptic visions |
| Sanjeev Khandekars twin installations present to the viewer an urban society blighted by consumer culture |
| SANJEEV KHANDEKAR'S twin installations at the Pundole and Museum Galleries serve the purpose of an interface,where the unholy melding of corporeality, economics and technology occurs with sustained force. At both the galleries the artist has created a gallery space within that of the original gallery. This creation though not a conceptual imperative could be looked upon as a simulation that inadvertently questions the much hallowed gallery space. Khandekar's one sustained concern in both the installations is the presence of grotesque co modification under the guise of evolution. |
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All that I Wanna Do at
the Museum Gallery with its niggling chatty inflection belies the one;underlying premise that questions the modalities that shape our world. On entering the gallery one is confronted by four legs torso-less legs.These entities are partly swaddled in the
quasi comfort of a stock index ticker, the printout of a seismograph, the diagram of an
IPU (Internal Processing Unit) or with the mesmeric structure of the human DNA, flattened. Here the apocalyptic motif of dismemberment is informed by a smooth, bloodless fiberglass reality.
From the menacing black ceiling dangle the eerily illuminated presence of 130 fiberglass
sculptures - Aladdin's Lamp Collection - of the human digestive system. Their stalactite like
eviscerating intensity could be suggestive perhaps of a reality where the body is a residual inconsequentiality. |
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| Placed underneath this catastrophic sky is the installation Shri Sugarcane Juke Centre/ Gokul Milk Centre. In Shri |
Sugarcane Juice Centre, Khandekar welds together a cacophony of
anxieties.From the directionless camera lenses that are prompt in their comment on the media
to an assembly line of baby na figurines
that with their coats of strangely metallic colours are all but sitting on a
conveyor belt that would lead it into the open
arena of trade. Alongside the various objects of comment
is placed the harshness of machineries like the shredder, the driller etcetera. This juxtaposition is brings into focus the curious state of coexistence that plagues society. On the flipside of this enticing purposefully
overwrought arrangement are a surfeit of rubber
nipples/pacifiers that comment on the human
need for needless placation. |
| Right: A life-size
figure of the artist; Left: Shri Sugarcane Juice Centre |
| Hindustan Times, 5th August 2005 |
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