Vartaman exhibition | Inside Yashika Sugandhs la la land

“I feel I dwell in my very own wonderland,” Yashika Sugandh says. Or, as she generally calls it, her “la la land”. It’s not a metaphor. When the up to date artist appears at strange issues, they refuse to remain nonetheless. Chairs sprout parrots and monkeys by horn-shaped funnels; a snail drifts away in a makeshift hot-air balloon as a hippo gazes upwards; tree branches knot and twist, crawling with leopards, chameleons, blue elephants, and rubber geese. Her world is one the place the principles of actuality are without end bent in the direction of play.

That sensibility was there from the start. Born in Calcutta in 1993 and raised in Delhi, Yashika remembers the large Semal tree that stood simply past her residence’s boundary wall. She named it Bunny and hosted picnics with it — two plates of chips, two glasses of Coke, bubbles blown into its branches. What would possibly appear like fantasy from the surface was, for her, survival: a method of creating house for herself when human connection felt precarious. “I all the time had low self-confidence and felt an absence of acceptance and love,” she says. “Instead, I discovered consolation in nature. Bunny grew to become my supply of connection and delight.”

But Sugandh’s la la land isn’t merely harmless. Look once more on the works: the colors are hyper-saturated, candy-box vibrant, however stare lengthy sufficient they usually start to bitter. Smiles stretch too vast, eyes bulge, sweetness ideas into one thing faintly grotesque. The works lure us in with childlike appeal solely to disclose one thing stranger, darker.

Why her wonderland issues

When her exhibition Vartaman (Hindi for “the current”) is launched to the general public, the curatorial observe describes her “profound reverence for nature” and the “nurturing essence of timber”. It is honest, little doubt, however these strains flatten her work into ethical instruction, turning timber into metaphors of advantage and birds into bullet factors for responsibility. The lifetime of the work slips away beneath the burden of “reverence” and “accountability.”

The frailty of such language is that it displays how uncomfortable we’ve develop into with play itself. We demand depth within the type of classes, and ethical payoff rather than creativeness. But whimsy, as Sugandh reminds us, may be critical work — it exhibits us the irrational, the grotesque, and the joyful instincts that make us human. To deal with it as infantile is to neglect that fantasy is certainly one of our oldest methods of pondering.

Her meticulous brushwork borrows from Indian miniature portray — the identical persistence and density of element, however turned in the direction of a far stranger cosmos. “Yashika’s apply goals by way of ecology, but is considerably rooted in our up to date instances,” says curator Sanya Malik. “Her hybrid creatures recommend a cohesion between humanity and nature. In the fast-paced atmosphere we now dwell in, her apply permits us to decelerate, and to acknowledge our encroachment on nature.”

Shifting the body

That phrase ecology, brings us to what makes her work related far past aesthetic delight. The Anthropocene — a time period coined by scientists to explain our present epoch — is the age by which human exercise has reshaped the planet’s local weather, soil, and biodiversity greater than any pure pressure. Most dialog round it centres on human guilt and accountability. But that framing, too, retains people on the centre.

Vartaman does the alternative. It doesn’t sermonise about our place in nature; it dissolves the very notion of a “place.” Her animals, objects, and hybrids coexist as equals, a part of an ecosystem detached to human significance. As Malik places it, Yashika’s works “assist us worth life in a significant method” exactly as a result of they take away us from the centre of it. In doing so, they provide a quiet corrective to the Anthropocene’s ego — the idea that we’re the planet’s protagonists. Her world reminds us that we’re merely certainly one of its unruly species, neither saviours nor villains, however contributors in its chaos.

Think about how we describe males once they’re odd: “mad genius,” “quirky visionary,” “troublesome however sensible,” “absent-minded professor.” Their strangeness turns into legend. Women, however, are known as “loopy,” “hysterical,” “unstable,” “frivolous,” even “witch.” The identical quirks that earn males cult standing have lengthy been used to decrease girls.

Which is why Sugandh’s wonderland issues. It refuses apology. It doesn’t attempt to make strangeness respectable or ornament profound. It merely insists that creativeness — particularly girls’s creativeness — doesn’t must be tamed to be significant.

Vartaman is on until October 31 at Black Cube Gallery, New Delhi.