An exhibition that raises questions about artist’s cognition & material culture

Team L&M

As a  precursor to their group show BRINK at India Art Fair (Gallery Booth A8, NSIC Exhibition Grounds, Okhla Industrial Estate, New Delhi from April 28 to May 02), Art Centrix Space is holding its exhibition Our Line in The Sand at its premises. Curated by Monica Jain, it features artists Tehmeena Firdos, Ruchika Singh Wason, Pinaki Ranjan Mohanty, Kundan Mondal, Manish Sharma, Tapas Biswas, Soham Raha, Nityanand Ojha, Siri Devi Khandavilli and Vinod Daroz.

Our Line in The Sand, has been inspired by Malafouris’ Material Engagement Theory which states that materiality – the world of things, artefacts, and material signs— affects the way humans have evolved cognitively. The exhibition raises questions about the relationship between an artist’s cognition and their material culture. Both philosophically and artistically, the curatorial proposition is interested in studying material culture, and human experiences and thought processes to fully understand further creative, expressive processes and how both of them are intertwined. The forming of marks as material signs brings about cognition as part of an expressive creative process. In that sense, the challenge would be to imagine and

produce knowledge around mark-making activities and how such processes can also be described and understood as ‘epistemic actions’ or calculated thought.

“My curatorial hypothesis would be that mark-making constitutes a salient point of intersection between matter and memory; one in which the plasticity of the mind becomes entangled with the plasticity (or stability) of material culture,” says Jain  adding that mark-making is essentially a skill and instead of asking ‘what are the marks of’?’ we should be asking ‘what did the marks do?”

The exhibition remains on view at Art Centrix Space, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi till May 21