People embedded. People dislocated. People relocated.
People embedded. People dislocated. People relocated.
A river flows between two distinctly opposite terrains. An undulating topography reveals the hidden layers of the landscape, filled with foliage referencing miniature paintings. But quickly, these elements give way to the geometry of modernisation and urbanisation. The rigid angular grids of the cities rapidly occupy the serene skies. In this exhibition, From the Realm of People, Chippa Sudhakar reflects upon the pace of this change and its effects on people.
The green patches of land are converted into civic, domestic, and commercial spaces of productivity and the circulation of intersecting and conflicting economies. Amid such a motivated “growth” and transforming terrains, people move, migrate, and create their life-worlds of transience. Everybody is subjected to this growth across the spectrum of classes and other customary genealogies, shaping the subjectivities of people conditioned by precarity. The technologies of information and transportation bridge distances while also creating opportunities and circumstances that disconnect people from their own lands. Unlike a river, capital never flows one way.
The flow of capital flattens the historical and cultural ecologies of places, rendering them homogeneous. The economic consistency of this loss fostered reproducible cartographies in which power becomes abstract and impenetrable. Sudhakar juxtaposes these grids of power with people negotiating their everyday economic, cultural, and political realities. Memories, histories, and emotional solidarities become dynamic processes embedded within this existential habitus.
This body of work does not romanticise the vanishing landscape or the receding nature, nor lament its loss. Instead, it becomes a subtle reminder of this visible shift we witness in cities as well as in the villages.