Art Basel Hong Kong | Online Viewing Room: Fragmented Views

Experimenter announces Fragmented Views a group presentation with works by Adip Dutta, Ayesha Sultana, Bani Abidi, Biraaj Dodiya, Julien Segard, Prabhakar Pachpute, Praneet Soi, Radhika Khimji, Rathin Barman, and Samson Young in Art Basel’s Online Viewing Rooms.

Fragmented Views, is a project that sets ideas of form, architecture, political dichotomies, personal relationships and histories at its core by examining how one’s immediate environment could be fundamentally ‘re-viewed’ through lenses that fragment our vision of what is seen in our visual and global landscape.

Adip Dutta’s sculptures of urban landscapes, especially of construction sites refer to built spaces, and a particular way of seeing one’s surroundings that are often distressingly barren yet intensely textural. As a sculptor, Dutta responds to the form of the site and the tools around him. In Rathin Barman’s sculptures, the nuances of the modern built environment as a tool for understanding socio-political history emerge. For over a decade, Barman, trained as an engineer and then a sculptor, has been working on understanding urban sprawl and how the built environment and architecture adapts itself to a growing influx of people over extended periods of time. For Ayesha Sultana, navigation through the city becomes an exercise of understanding and finely balancing one’s own body in relation to the built environment, much as understanding the spatial occurrences and relationships between her works and their intrinsic mediums.

Bani Abidi’s Security Barriers are brightly colored and patterned drawings of the concrete and iron barricades found throughout Karachi. The works raise questions about safety and separation, demonstrations of state violence, and political strategies of demarcation. Out of context, against a white background, they resemble minimalist abstractions. Samson Young with a cross-cultural training in music composition channels his attunement to melody by pushing formalist boundaries that create innovative cross-media experiences that touch upon the recurring topics of identity, war and literature. Otocky, a series of drawings concerning a game which was a pioneer in introducing a special genre of ‘musical’ video games, where control, intention and accuracy or the lack of such allowed certain musical results to be achieved.

Biraaj Dodiya’s paintings, part funereal abstractions, part nocturnal landscapes, can be considered as studies of uncertainty and distance. Moments of abrasion and resistance are hinged from slivers of light, balancing movement and stasis, form and vision. The intensely textured, tactile surface of her work carries a bodily, corporeal depth that manifests a story told through spatial means. In a related practice, Radhika Khimji, uses painting, stitching and assemblage on cloth, wood and paper, developing a way of working informed by the physicality and materiality of the making process that deconstructs formulated identities. The body is viewed as a vehicle in the vortex of space and time; by constantly fragmenting and destabilizing the relationship between the body and landscape.

Julien Segard often looks at the residual value of the discarded and refused, articles that we use and are close to at some time but let go of. Using a range of found items, Segard’s watercolors, attempt to re-examine materials that have been foregone, to find a renewed meaning in the disused. For Praneet Soi, the circularity of the photographic image and its relation to painting attempt to triangulate our position in society from paintings of the human body and an archive of images.

Prabhakar Pachpute’s practice explores his ongoing interest in mining politics, farmers’ movements and human conflicts with nature. His work depicts the damaged ecological and urban landscape under anthropogenic threats in works such as Moving Cities.

Fragmented Views take these anchors of thoughts, and nuanced relationship emerge through an oblique study of each artist’s unique visual horizon using mixed media, sculpture, sound drawings, architectural renderings, and painting