Flowers, Courtyards and Other Worlds
A world is never encountered whole. It is assembled through surfaces and structures, inherited images and material traces, remembered places and imagined terrains. Bringing together Manu Parekh, Promiti Hossain, Rakesh Patel and Shravan Rao, IRAM Art Gallery’s presentation considers how acts of making give form to worlds that remain multiple and partly obscured. Across painting, sculpture and works on paper, matter becomes a means of understanding how bodies occupy space, how memory settles into architecture, and how histories continue to inhabit the present.
The flower becomes a central form within this field. In Manu Parekh’s paintings, it acquires the force of a body, an icon and an emotional presence. Moving between still life, portraiture and sacred image, his flowers carry associations of fertility, mortality, offering and renewal. In Promiti Hossain’s works, botanical forms, bodies, animals and ornamental patterns accumulate across handmade paper and etched acrylic sheets. Transparency allows different visual registers to overlap, turning the image into a garden of concealment, memory and entanglement.
Rakesh Patel approaches habitation through the courtyard, understood as an architectural, social and sacred form. Constructed through wood, mixed media and Corten steel, his courtyards organise relations between interiority and gathering, protection and exposure, the human and the divine. Shravan Rao’s painted architecture is more psychologically unstable. Domestic fragments, vegetation, figures and sharply angled planes fold into one another, producing spaces suspended between lived experience, recollection and dream.
Seen together, these works suggest that habitation is not only a matter of occupying a place. It also concerns the ways in which places, materials, stories and inherited forms occupy us. The booth becomes a field of partial worlds: flowers poised between body and icon, layered gardens, sacred courtyards, architectures of recollection, ecological terrains and migrating shadows. Their encounter does not resolve their differences. Instead, it reveals how worlds are continually assembled through the forms by which life is housed, remembered, offered and transformed.
- Satyajit Dave
