Artistic tryst with politics

Titled ‘Broken Cogs in the Machine’, the display is a culmination of Roy’s journey with the Emerging Artist Award, which he received in 2018. His art practice emerges from a continued engagement with grassroots politics that has led to the development of a vernacular vocabulary around modes of collaborative making, tools of resistance and a multitude of contexts around art and activism.

Moving beyond conventional formats of display, his drawings and paintings are informed by a discursive, political witnessing and an awareness of the deep roots of systemic violence and injustice. Through this exhibition, Roy brings together an inventory of work encompassing a range of forms and explorations with media, looking at the historical constitution of the working class in the contemporary moment, its resident fragilities, and its motile, migrant presence as a well-oiled cog across multiple terrains of functionality. It follows a concept of ‘brokenness’ that addresses the experience of being part of a larger system, while retaining a sense of individual agency and personhood. The cog, as it turns through systems, negotiates states of passivity and modes of organization that require it to occupy certain strategies and directions. With this line of thought, Roy uses the cog as a pivot to argue the nature of ‘brokenness’ as an engagement with the political subject(ivity) of change, and more importantly, as a method of developing a self-reflexive artistic practice.

Where: Vadehra Art Gallery
When: Till 5 August, 10 am to 6 pm

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