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‘The Castle of Crossed Destinies’
Ajay Dhandre, Baiju Parthan, Chittrovanu Mazumdar & Nandan Purkayastha
February 2019

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With this exhibition, Art Musings carries the year-long five-show sequence celebrating the 20th anniversary of its founding into the gallery’s own space. The celebration began at the Jehangir Art Gallery in February ‘19 with The Opening Plenary, a show that presented works, all created especially for the occasion, by 20 artists. Across 2019, a sequence of five shows, each comprising works by four of these 20 artists, will open at Art Musings.

The first of the five exhibitions The Castle of Crossed Destinies opens on 5 March ’19 featuring four artists whose individually distinctive oeuvres intersect at key points. All of them are devoted to a consideration of the unpredictable convergence of past and future. All are held in rapture by the simultaneity of fossil, trace, engine and dream. All, in different ways, reflect pensively on what it means to be human as well as animal or machine, to belong to several species or categories of being at the same time. These concerns have animated the practices of Ajay Dhandre, Baiju Parthan, Chittrovanu Mazumdar, and Nandan Purkayastha, across generations, geographical locations, pedagogical trajectories and journeys of exploration, and choices of medium.

Ajay Dhandre is a time-traveller, shuttling between an evocation of rediscovered pasts and imagined futures. In his works, such as ‘The Found and the Made’ and ‘Back to the Future 1 and 2’, he combines natural and human-made objects into a record of the interaction between a species and its habitat. In his art, he has often brought together fossils and relics suggesting geological deep time, as well as composite forms signalling epochs to come, such as cyborgs, robots, prosthetic devices and interstellar probes.