OF DESIRE MACHINES AND HUMAN CONDITIONS
‘ Soft subversion’ and ‘Human conditions’
were two conceptual frameworks with
which Birendra Pani and Rajiba Pani worked
for their exhibition in Red Earth Gallery in
Baroda’.Soft subversion’ speaks about the
‘new social reality in which the maximum
of ecstasy is combined with the maximum of
consciousness.’(Felix Guattari)He is eloquent
about the most censored and the feted issue
of ’ desire’ and how desire is not coded in any
singular fashion but functions at multiple
levels.Narrations of desiring bodies and
objects punctuate his works.Th e divide
becomes thin between body and objects,
they become one; the object of desire.
Birendra hails from Odisha where there is a
living tradition of Palm leaf paintings which
allows the pleasure principle to be explored
uninhibitedly through fi ne engraved lines.
Th e temples of Konark also had Shringarik
representations celebrating corporal love.’His
OF DESIRE MACHINES AND HUMAN CONDITIONS
series 365 Dreams 365 drawings 365 stories
remind me of Bhupen Khakhar’s short
stories like Vadki where characters delve
into each other’s personal life in a chawl
and discovers the sexual rendezvous of the
neighbours or in Phoren Soap where sexual
fantasies are woven around a soap and the
owner of the soap ends up buying a bag full
of soaps when he loses one.Longing turns to
obsessions ,a movement towards the excess.
Th ese images show what Guattari says-
‘Together ,we have begun to explore all the
workings of our attractions,repulsions,our
resistances,our representations,our
fetishes,our obsessions,our phobias.Th e’’
unconfessionable’’ secret has become for us
a matter for refl ection,public discussion ,and
political action –where politics is taken as
the social manifestation of the irrepressible
aspirations of the ‘living being’.’’ Th e use of
repetitive motifs like exhausted tubes or
phalluses,apples or watches forms a pattern
speaking about the excess which capitalism
produces .Desires disseminated in capsules
pouring out, spilling all over the pictorial
frame become an oft recurring image in
his works. He also brings in the critique
of the overuse of mediatic realism and
paradoxically puts together his drawings
and the meticulously painted images. Th ere
are visuals in the series ‘Th e melting reality
‘where his self portrait melts, the ideal head
of the Buddha also loses its contours ,both
of them being constructs of the ideals of
visual arts, one construed with reference to
Sadanga and the other from the technical
knowhow. Birendra was trained as a print
maker and the basic step being drawing
instils in him the urge to produce such set of
fi ne drawings with lot of explorations of lines
which evolves forms.