Samar Singh Jodha
OUTPOST Artist Samar Singh Jodha’s latest enterprise is a visual disquisition on a global culture where individual aesthetic notions are framed by commercial interests, and homogenised to such a degree by mass media that spontaneous individual expressions often emerge as accidental bi-products of non-aesthetic pursuits. He highlights this unusual state of affairs via a pictorial trope of discarded containers fashioned into habitat by miners in India’s pristine northeast. The fact that Jodha foregrounds his work with a people given to excavating precious minerals from the earth’s womb to keep the engines of the same mass culture and industry running, adds poignant irony to his endeavour. The interplay of narratives represented by a broken people and their robust expression unravels the threads of a global technopoly that promises a rosy future to many of us via rapid innovation, while simultaneously condemning many others to centuries-old regression. In deploying photographic imagery as the foundation stone of this work, Jodha summons a visual discourse that is rooted in documentary practice, yet is scarcely mimetic of that art form. As a seasoned artist, he is all too aware of its diminished power in the post-modern era. There is therefore a double dispossession at play here. The sliver of optimism in this work is a notion that art-making is too precious a gift to be restricted only to the virtuoso.
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