As the Amazon burns and ancestral terrain is pixelated, artist Satadru Sovan Banduri's work turns lament into a visual requiem
In the thick of monsoon, Satadru Sovan Banduri's canvases pull you elsewhere vanishing forest, a mournful peacock, and a planet on the brink of forgetting itself.
At Kalakriti Art Gallery's dual showcase - 'Echoes from the Dislocated Silence' and 'Eternal Lotus: A Sacred Art of Pichwai' - the contrast could not be more pronounced. On one end, the devotional splendour of Pichwai art, reinterpret- ed through modern eyes. On the other hand, Banduri's surreal, grief-drenched landscapes where every mushroom grows like a tombstone and every petal seems to weep.
"I don't paint the forest as it looks," says Banduri, a Fulbright Scholar and globally exhibited artist, "I paint what it feels like when it's about to be erased."
"It's not dystopia," Banduri clarifies. "It's documentation. This is already happening in the Amazon, in Gachibowli, in memory."
His practice spans Bengal gouache, digital collage, and sculptural framing. One of the central inspirations behind this series is the ongoing conflict over the forested lands at Hyderabad Central University over 400 acres of ecologically sensitive terrain in Kancha Gachibowli, now threatened by infrastructure development. "The land isn't just topsoil," Banduri says, "It's ancestral memory. It's a breathing archive. It holds rituals, stories, species- all of which are being muted, pixel by pixel."
His Amazonian series, "The Vanishing Pharmacy of the Planet,' underscores this ecological grief on a global scale. "Over 10,000 acres disappear daily," he explains. "And every tree might contain a cure- for cancer, for memory loss, for something we don't even know we're dying of yet." His tone isn't alarmist, but mournful- more requiem than rally-ing cry. "This is not a crisis of resources. It's a crisis of forgetting." Critics often read surrealism as escapism. Banduri's is anything but that. "Surrealism, for me, is confrontation," he insists.
The show is on till August 11.
