A landscape begins to resemble memory. A body slips into colour. A head remains after the body has disappeared. Somewhere, the visible world is still being carefully observed.
Elsewhere, it has already begun to dissolve.
No Single Ground brings together different moments in Indian modernism without asking them to resolve into a common language. Instead, the exhibition follows a continual movement in the ground from which an image is made.
The body becomes gesture, occupation, fragment and interiority. Landscape moves between place, atmosphere and psychic space. Representation gives way to surface, mass, colour and abstraction, only to return elsewhere in another form.
Nothing begins entirely anew. Older visual languages, popular images, artisanal knowledge, personal memory and lived experience persist within the modern. What appears abstract may still carry a landscape. What seems intimate may contain a much larger history. What looks inherited may become a means of experimentation.
Body, landscape and abstraction therefore recur without settling into categories. Each becomes the ground from which something else can emerge.
Perhaps modernism is most alive at this point of uncertainty, when the source of an image can no longer be taken for granted.
No Single Ground asks what happens when that ground must continually be found, lost and
made again.
-Satyajit Dave
Mumbai, September 202