Standing on Sacred Ground - Bikaner House, New Delhi

The exhibition seeks to draw a bridge between the inner world of the artist and an external world of myths, legends and fables. What is all that the artists consider sacred—is it the material, the subject, their roots, scenes from the everyday or the stories they grew up with? On Sacred Ground looks at a group of visual art practitioners, who bring a certain reverence to their practice—be it in their subjects or the process of making art itself. They draw from the vibrant tapestry of indigenous practices, traditional motifs and ubiquitous objects and then recontextualise them in their practice. 

There is a sense of the familiar and the unfamiliar in the works on display. It evokes memories in the viewer of bedside tales narrated by grandparents of mythological heroes and heroines. There are glimpses of ancient frescoes, temple art, traditional mask making and murals in the materiality of the works, be it the use of earth pigments and gold leaf in paintings or large-scale bronze masks. And yet these practices stand out for being contemporary in their language and outlook. 

Time, ritual and memory run like leitmotifs through the works on display. Keerti Pooja ends up being a chronicler of the briefest of pauses in people’s routines and the traces that they leave behind. The imagery of garland threads through her work—the unfinished ones suggesting memory of a gesture, which has faded with time. The theme of time is evident in Dhruti Mahajan’s minimalist abstract works as well albeit in a completely different way. Her white-on-white creations are backed by a meditative ritual of repetition, mark-making and a play of light, shadow and texture. 

The ideas of mythology and divinity manifest themselves in many different ways across the exhibition. In his fibreglass and bronze sculptures of Lord Rama, Sita, Hanuman, Krishna and Rukmini, Bolgum Nagesh Goud connects age-old stories with the path to spiritual enlightenment through layered symbolism. The works are rooted in Telangana's cheriyal and other leather puppetry traditions while being rendered in a contemporary minimalist sculptural language. The faces in his sculptures feature intricately-detailed narratives, becoming a stage of sorts where myths and legends unfold. 

Though many of the participating artists have consistently responded to divine figures and deities in their practice, there is nothing religious or traditional about their creations. They excavate the layers of stories to eke out the deep symbolic meanings underlying them. For R. Giridhara Gowd, Shiva and Shakti—his eternal muses—are not just manifestations of sacred feminine and masculine energies but represent a balance between creation and destruction. He brings together memories of murals from Lepakshi, Badami and Hampi and experiences of tempera and fresco-making with  modern sophisticated sensibilities and an originality of thinking. 

For each artist in the exhibition, the process of creating art is one of meditation and metamorphosis. The soft and gradual gradation in the jewel like tones in Sachin Jaltare’s work is tangible evidence to his inner transformation as he works on a painting. As his thoughts ebb and flow, the tone and depth of the colour also changes. He too responds to Shiva and Shakti as symbols of formlessness and form, absence and presence but through a visual language marked by quasi-figuration. 

Mayadhar Sahu, who hails from Astapura in Odisha, draws on vivid recollections of temples in Puri and Konark. However, his interest goes beyond the visible heritage. He reflects on the faith that each stone has in another with no cement to bind them. The artist is inspired by this relationship of trust that makes the temple architecture resilient. 

Classical music, the smell of rain and memories of a childhood spent in rural Bengal coalesce in Bratin Khan’s monochromatic tempera works. The warm embrace of his mother’s lap, coming home from school and wandering into lush jungles, and hours spent watching lotus fronds hug one another—remembrances such as these engulf him in his studio everyday. That, together with the days spent at Visva-Bharati University, where the artist devised his own language of tempera. A prolific Rabindra Sangeet exponent and a trained tabla player, you can see the strong influence of classical music in the way colours coalesce together in harmony.

In a way these artists form bridges between ancient philosophies, wisdom and everyday living. They continue to embody the past and the present within themselves and their practices. It is this blend that On Sacred Ground seeks to offer to the viewer—a relatable and modern approach to timeless spiritual tenets.