A review on solo show ‘Archive of Memory’ by Aiswaryan K at Gallery Sumukha, 10^th September – 7^th October, 2023, Bangalore.

Archiving has been a human tendency to accumulate and reflect on the past as well as looking forward to a future that inherits its qualities or leave them behind. These are often personal and collective forms of memories that takes tangible avatars. Whether an archive is a collectible object from the livelihood or an archive created from personal memories, it enables recalling, iterating, commenting, criticizing and discussing on the subject of archive. While there are different possible ways to archive memory, Aiswaryan prefers to manifest a sense of archive through artistic idioms. He tries to trace back his roots and identities, both personal and collective through his works displayed.

Ammayum Jnanum (Mom and Me) is a painting that depicts the bond between the artist and his mother. He narrates how mother becomes our first connection with the world and the relation is quiet personal, intimate and unique. It also echoes on universal motherhood based on reality and love. The blue nighty with white spots on it resembles the infinite blue sky and the red, egg shaped area suggests the warmth and bond. It can also connect with the idea of our existence as a trace of memories in the form of genes passing down biologically along with the love and passion of motherhood. We all are memories essentially with extensions of our ancestors.

Matrilineal is a work that extends from the above mentioned attitude. He deploys a mundane yet, culturally adhered fabric, the mundu (a long piece of white cloth worn by Keralites) as the surface, on to which he draws multiple isolated figures. Aiswaryan attempts to trace back his roots with his ancestry and its matrilineal sensibilities through the figures drawn on the mundu. He goes on to narrate about the dhobi community in Kerala to which he belongs, the discontinued occupation and the migration of a part of his family to the city, gives him mere fragmented traces of his ancestry. He tries to bring in an archive of his family members which also acts as a tribute to them. Women were the homemakers and often bread earners in a matrilineal setup which also brings in a gender balance in these communities. Mundu is a gender neutral cloth and white as a color stands for tranquility. Towards the right end one could see a hybrid dog, which could also be a self reference of the artist’s existence in a liminal of hybridity and yearning to belong. While asserting an ode to the extincting family occupation and relational bonding through the work, it also brings in the irony of discontinuity through the choice to be an artist, an observer. It denotes our existence as an archive of multitude of references of material, metaphysical and physiological experiences that correlate to collective memory and collective identity.

Silver Lining is a spiral installation designed using acrylic beads on zinc wire. Each cubical bead consists of four alphabets and each bead is arranged one after the other. These beads consist of the names of the artist’s friends, well-wishers and other people whom he met in life. He considers them as the reason for his success and therefore this works as a token of gratitude to them and aptly titled a Silver Lining, which indicates ‘a hopeful prospect’. Here archive works as an act of memorizing the people in the form of texts and preserving them, akin to a practice close to writing or documenting against the large human possibility of amnesia. It also echoes concepts like everyone who inspires or influences us leaves some sort of traces on us, psychologically. This work generated an interactive possibility where the spectators were keen to read out the names and also curious to find out their names on the beads.

Everything Yet Nothing moves further to explore the interrupted bond between humans and nature. It is a circular shaped installation made of earth and adhesive on paper. There are shapes of utilitarian and objects of vanity cut out from the circular sheet and the soil pours down. This installation is also aesthetically worked on with multiple spotlights leading to create multiple shadows. It speaks about environmental concerns like excessive consumerism, waste and pollution. He speaks about how sapiens as a dominant species, have been too greedy to endlessly consume and it leads to global warming as a result of taking nature for advantage. The abundance is something that’s borrowed from the future and our desires never seems stop no matter what part of society we come from. This work echoes on how mother earth reacts to the human acts that tear apart the natural harmony and what could be the possible complications of survival on this planet for the future generations to come therefore trying to connect past with the future.

Aiswaryan K is a contemporary artist from Bangalore who has been working with various mediums. Apart from his artistic practices he also connects the art community across the city by reaching out to widespread information about art shows and studio spaces. His art works are by and large on subjects like self, identity, representations based in the context of a growing metropolitan city, negotiating with objects around him and other personal dialogues. Through this seemingly interrupted thread of visual engagement, the artist tries to recollect biological, ancestral, social, and modern roots and relationships and the show acts as a tribute to various people. Through the spatial analysis, these unasserted, mutually non-reciprocative works on display seem like an attempt to come out of an archetype which is usually associated with the idea of solo exhibit; which is a consistent language. These deviate from the artist’s usual oeuvre of works with an experimental attitude while moving from the context of self to the zone of archiving the other.

Aishwaryan completed his Diploma in Painting from the KEN School of Art (2008) and a Post-Diploma in Printmaking from Bangalore University (2010). He is a recipient of various prestigious awards and grants that of the 44th Karnataka Lalit Kala Akademi State Award (2016), Graphic Fellowship, Karnataka Lalit Kala Akademi (2018), Kala Sanchara Travel Grant, Karnataka Lalit Kala Akademi (2017), Shenoy Art Foundation Emerging Artist Award (2016), Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation (2015); Jury Award, Chandra Ilango Visual Art Foundation (2015), K K Hebbar Art Foundation, (2015), Arnawaz Vasudev Charities Scholarship (2009 & 08), AnanticaJija Singh Foundation Scholarship (2008), and Nadoja Shri R. M. Hadapad Student Scholarship (2006). He also worked on a solo project ‘The Artist’s World’, curated by Vaishnavi Ramanathan, at the Mumbai Art Room, Mumbai (2015).

He has also exhibited and participated in various group shows like ‘da(r)shak’, by IPEP, Bihar Museum, Patna (2023), ‘Encrypted’, curated by Lina Vincent, Apre Art House, Mumbai (2023), ‘Thooklagana mana hai’, curated by Nilesh Kinkale, Shenoy Design Studio, Bengaluru & Nippon Gallery, Mumbai (2023), and Alli-Illi/Achi-Kochi/There-Here’, India + Japan, 1Shanthiroad Studio/Gallery, Bengaluru (2021), to name a few.