Ishara Art’s latest exhibition, a cumulative of images, text and sounds, reminds us how we cannot cut off from our past and future

Nurturing emerging and cutting edge artistic practices from South Asia on an international platform, Ishara Art Foundation presents, Growing Like A Tree: Static In The Air.

Curated by Delhi based Sohrab Hura, the foundation furthers its commitment to path breaking curatorial directions in the fields of photography and contemporary art by inviting Hura to expand on his debut curatorial project that opened in January this year.

Altering in visual and aural intensity, the show introduces multiple levels of experiences as several texts in the exhibition change, newly added works sit side by side with selected existing works, some of which shift in scale and volume. 

Together they form a cumulative current of images, texts and sounds. According to Hura, the reference to frequencies is a reminder of how we inhabit the contemporary through moments that cannot be cut off from the past or the future. His curation embodies this idea as the exhibition gradually unfolds, layering our experiences of time and space, image and sound.

Static In The Air emphasizes the importance of traversing the world through listening. It gestures towards a re-tuning of sonic frequencies while learning to stay with static.

The ensemble of artists and collectives in the second iteration include Aishwarya Arumbakkam, Bunu Dhungana, Farah Mulla, Jaisingh Nageswaran, Katrin Koenning, Kushal Ray, Nida Mehboob, Prantik Basu, Rahee Punyashloka, Raqs Media Collective, Reetu Sattar, Sarker Protick, Sathish Kumar, The Packet and Zainab Mufti, along with site-specific interventions by Sohrab Hura.

Photographic works such as Kushal Ray’s Intimacies map time over a decade in the life of a family. Prantik Basu’s short film Sakhisona moves further into the past to unearth stories and songs performed around an ancient mound in West Bengal, where 6th-century artifacts were discovered. 

In Rahee Punyashloka’s Noise reduction II: Chinatown, the screen becomes a landscape embedded with material corrosions such as scratches on film, as well as spliced imagery and fragmented voiceovers. 

The Packet collective creates their own soundscape by installing a dot-matrix printer that emits reams of paper into the exhibition space. Both Zainab Mufti’s The Weight of Snow on Her Chest and Raqs Media Collective’s video 31 Days reference times of isolation. Mufti offers intimate perspectives from the inside and outside spaces of a home and garden in Kashmir. 

The exhibition is on display till December 9

(Cover: Bunu Dhungana, from the series Confrontations)