shedding the skin

#shedding the skin

Telling contemporary stories of lived experiences and loss through used, ephemeral objects has been addressed in most of Surekha’s works. As a visual/video artist, Surekha has been exploring artistic forms through installations, video & photography for the last two decades. Her works investigate how visuality can engage with gender/ecology/socio-political aesthetics, negotiating public and private spaces.

Surekha is currently holding a solo-exhibition ‘shedding the skin’, of her artworks at Gallery Sumukha between 24th June – 22rd July 2023. The current exhibition is an amalgamation of her artistic creation from the last 25 years, in various contemporary forms like sculptural installations, photo-performances and videos.

In the present show, Surekha explores clothing as a metaphor to the body, focusing on ‘human body as a territory’. In the series of photographs and sculptural works, she has mapped the sinews and fragile structure of human form which has extended into the practice beyond the literal body, in order to commemorate the “body politics”. For her, clothing is a map – that indicates the metamorphosis of the body, amidst the changing political and historical facets of culture. Herein Surekha has tried to use the image of the mundane clothes, between blouse to nightie, appropriating their representations.

Her process of execution includes creating art costumes and photography. For her, the objects represent a kind of skin as well as clothes made out of different artistic materials, depending on the situation. Her inquiry into the body and clothing continues as photo performances, through her creative outputs. In her photographs it is the body language that is created between the ‘wearing’ & ‘performing’ of the clothes over the body, redefining the very receptive surface.

In retrospect, the subject/theme of Surekha’s present show has focused on treating the human physique as a kind of geo-cultural location for a visual discourse. Her artistic attempt explores the ‘skin as a form of clothing’ and ‘body as a site of enquiry’ from the lenses of gender and identity. This is a euphoric collision between the painterly, sculpted and thematic addressal of the socio-cultural issues of gender and formal politics of craft elements. These are played from within the interactive capabilities of the essence of both the classic notion of form and content.

-Surekha