Stained Geographies, Saju Kunhan’s first solo exhibition at TARQ, brings together a body of work that is the result of Kunhan's exploration of the archive along with the re-interpretation of images in shifting contexts. He uses wood and archival images to articulate his conceptual investigations.
Accompanied by an essay penned by architect and researcher Anuj Daga, Saju’s exhibition catalogue highlights the spectacular variation in scale that Saju is able to execute. His works range from small scale multimedia drawings of cityscapes to immense multi-panel works that use image transfers onto wood to depict maps and large-scale migrations from city to city, and indeed across the world. By working with maps and spaces, Saju creates a mythical, almost fantasy world, that prompts questions of where we are, how we got there, and where will go from here.
According to Anuj Daga, “Movement, collisions, ruffles and stains give meaning to life in Saju’s works. Staining is an active process that enables our engagement with history. And it is through such engagement that we are able to define distinct geographies – physical as well as cultural. What shall be the shape of the world as seen through the extents of such engagements? The works presented in this selection invite us to live the space between the finished and the incomplete. It paints a possibility in the life of a stain that gains definition in its fading, or one that learns to fades in its firmness. Saju’s geographies reconcile stains into shades of landscapes that have accumulated meaning over a slow process of history. It gestures to the stained geographies we all eventually come to inhabit.”
