Review on the solo show ‘Is Today Better than Yesterday’ by Surekha Sharada at 1 Shantiroad Studio/Gallery, Bangalore, 17th -24th May 2022.

Surekha Sharada is a contemporary visual artist based in Bangalore. Her works have been exhibited in various national and international museums like San Jose Museum (USA), Museum Guimet (Paris), Kunst Kruezberg (Germany) Kunstraum Museum (Bern), Devi Foundation, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (New Delhi), and many more. Her works investigates how visuality can engage with gender, ecology, and sociopolitical aesthetics negotiating public and private spaces. She works with photography, video archive, installations, and performance from the last two decades. 

Is Today Better than Yesterday is a solo show that displays an amalgamation of installation, videos, photomontage, and text-based artworks through which Surekha attempts to manifest different perspectives of the pandemic time experiences around the altered idea of human touch. The artist narrates about her personal loss, over flooded disturbing unusual texts and visuals in print media and news broadcasts on pandemic that she encountered on a daily basis. From being at a pause, she takes inspiration from nature that aided her to get back to work and reflect from within the boundaries of the pandemic waves. 

The installation (The Lost Pair) of piled-up shoes occupying half the gallery space consisted of different varieties of shoes of construction labourers collected from different sites in Bangalore. It also comprised leftover shoes and boots of migrant workers. Shoes are something we cannot imagine as unpaired. The title ‘The Lost Pair’ indicates a subtle yet personal connotation of incomplete experiences which are lost amidst the chaos; with a pulsation to be traced back. 

Surekha with her contextual fieldwork deploys shoes as a loaded device of subjectivity and as a metaphor of experience; as observer and partaker. The piledup boots and shoes brings in a monumental feel that acts as a representational apparatus and also holds the stories of the bearer as well as brings in a plethora of endless semiotic possibilities associated with foot wears. This ranges from the celebrated visuals and discourses on Van Gogh’s paintings of shoes, the scene of Chaplin consuming a shoe from the Gold Rush, and the haunting residues of victims of the..

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