When we acknowledge a relatively new but fundamental principle of art study, that art is material culture with definitive characteristics and specificities and contains the ability to move the maker and the viewer, it brings to the fore art’s ability to encompass psychology, anthropology, history, identity and all their wider influential properties.

Zarmeene Shah has curated work from a group of nine graduates from the M.Phil programme of the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS). These practitioners graduated at different times during the previous two years, when Shah was Director Graduate Studies. The explorative, cerebral show at Koel Gallery, titled ‘Investigative Aesthetics’, allows the artists to chart their own course, unburdened by the confines of a curatorial dictate. As a result, we discover diverse research-based explorations, varying modes of determining discourse and a wide plurality of ideas.

Many of these practitioners have lived a few lives, so to say, before joining the programme, so even the individualisation is not angst-ridden but rather communal. It seems Shah has reiterated critical engagement with social, historical and community-based research that pertains to a greater good rather than individualistic catharsis, which is how meaningful post-grad studies are conducted.

There are, however, overlaps in the thematic structures of the exhibiting artists — three of the nine speak of trauma, two of generational trauma, a psychological buzzword that is used a tad too often in the recent milieu. But the disturbing times we live in call for the recognition of all shades of trauma: personal, professional, generational, communal, political, social and psychological — and the resultant effects thereof.

Nine artists excavated their own lives and pasts in a recent group show that........

© Dawn (Magazines)