For 23-year-old Anirudh Singh Shaktawat, the disappearing hills in his native village Semari in the southern Aravali ranges in Rajasthan, made such an impact during his childhood years that the landscape has become the focus of the sculptor’s second solo show, currently installed at a city gallery.
Titled, Non-Monolith: A Body in Particles, has five poignant works that pull out heavily from his memories and what the hills are like today. “The giant hills fell to indiscriminate mining and quarrying in Rajasthan and now you find them scattered like small rocks,” says the 23-year-old, who returned with a BFA degree with distinction from the School of Art Institute, Chicago, last year.
The hills in Anirudh’s village are no longer massive structures and he searches for stories in the small stones he has been collecting over the years, he says. The reason why he has named his show non-monolith is because the southernmost point of Rajasthan in the Aravali ranges is a landscape in fragments today.
Sculptor's impression of disappearing hills | Photo Credit: Special arrangement
What you see are the hills shattered in pieces, they sit in heaps lined in rows, its body distributed in parts. How does one relate to rock when it is disintegrating and not awe inspiring?” he asks. There is a stark reality that he displays in black and white, separating image from matter, living from the non-living, and human from the non-human. “In this entangled space you exist with rock and not besides it,” says Anirudh whose conception of Nature dissolves material and spatial boundaries. With hundreds of stones taken from the site, he creates graven images with a pillar and differently shaped stones. An uncanny feeling floats as there is the vibrancy of matter and message in the subject he has chosen.
On till August 13 at Blueprint 12, C- 66 Anand Niketan; 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. (Monday to Saturday)
