Disappearing Echoes of the Isolated: by Satadru Sovan Banduri

Satadru Sovan Banduri’s practice emerges at the intersection of speculative ecology and metamorphic embodiment, and posthuman imagination. Working across a range of media, his compositions on canvas and beyond engage with a lineage that spans Hieronymus Bosh’s phantasmagoric tableaux, Max Ernst’s surrealist myth-making, and the visual poetics of dreamlike-dystopian psychedelia. His densely populated canvases craft speculative ecosystems where bodies, species, and temporalities collapse into one another. His work echoes traditions of world-building in art history―undoing fixed perspectives and taxonomic order in favour of hybridity, mutation and ontological play. 

Art-Historically, Satadru’s surfaces recall the density of Indic painting traditions and surrealist compositions, yet his spatial ruptures and hallucinatory figuration also nod to the psychedelic aesthetics of 1970s counterculture. His bio-surrealism is grounded in a politics of place―marked by South Asian visual traditions, postcolonial inheritances, and posthuman epistemologies. His painterly spaces, often unstable and multi-planar, draw from the surrealist dissolution of rations perspective but are inflected by posthumanist thought.

Donna Haraway’s notion of speculative fabulation is central here: Banduri does not represent reality but composes ontological experiments. Figures mutate, terrains shift, species misalign. Works such as No Wing Returns or Rupture and Remind are not allegorical; they are provocations―material propositions of kinship across decay, desire, and becoming. Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman theory finds visual corollary here: Satadru’s world is one in which bodies are porous, agency is distributed, and identity is always in process.

His temporalities resist linearity. Instead, his canvases operate within “deep time”―a concept drawn from geology. Titles like Rhamphorynchus Reptile Bound to Soar speak to paleontological imagination, yet they resist nostalgia and evolutionary triumph, where non-normative rhythms of life interrupt capitalist futurism and Darwinian chronologies. This is time as sediment, not sequence―a mode of being with extinction, not beyond it. 

Within his cosmology, the trauma of earthquakes and shifting tectonic plates become not just geological metaphor but political index―evoking the violent realignments wrought by urban development, where entire animal habitats are hijacked to make way for skyscrapers. Satadru’s canvases register such moments as ontological ruptures: acts of “animal hijacking” in which future-facing developments erase nonhuman lifeworlds. The haunting image of peacocks crying amid the razing of forest land in Hyderabad―bulldozers clearing the ground for yet another IT Park―echoes powerfully through his visual landscapes, collapsing “deep time” into the brutal immediacy of ecological erasure. 

He builds layered, immersive surfaces where lush chromatin fields―electric pinks, lurid greens, toxic blues―pulse with effect. These are not merely aesthetic choices but political strategies. As art historian Karin Cope notes in her writing on color and excess, saturated hues can perform “disobedience” within regimes of taste and restraint. The saturation and ornamentation further recall the politics of visual excess not in utopian blueprints but in ephemeral, camp gestures that gesture toward the “not-yet-here.” Banduri’s surfaces shimmer with such potentialities, even as they mourn ecological degradation.

Satadru Sovan Banduri does not offer coherent answers or stable meanings. Rather his works stage speculative encounters―with ruin, with pleasure, with after-life. His work invites not passive viewing but what Eve Sedgwick described as “reparative reading" a

 way of engaging art that embraces contradiction, affect, and ambiguity. His paintings demand that we feel with them, grieve with them and imagine through them. In a moment of planetary precarity, his visual cosmologies do not restore order. They re-enchant disorder as a site of speculative, pleasure, and possibility. 

 - Satyajit Dave

  Bombay, June 2025