Aicon is delighted to presentSilently Continuing…,the gallery’s second solo exhibition of New Delhi-based artist Pooja Iranna. The exhibition marks the artist’s return to the gallery after her debut presentation at Bikaner House in New Delhi was cut short in March 2020 due to the pandemic.
Spanning the breadth of her practice,Silently Continuing…is an endeavor by Iranna to capture the sensations of a city as experienced by individuals, not as designed by architects and planners. The artist’s new body of work is extremely sensitive, as it attempts to bring forth what an explosion of urbanization—and its standardization that we see today in the name of modernization and development—would mean for an individual in real terms. Through drawings on acrylic sheets, lens-based media (including video and photography), and sculpture using glass, concrete and staple pins, the works in this exhibition attempt to trace the effects of architecture on emotions and psyche while simultaneously finding traces of our emotional and psychological lives in the structures and patterns of architecture.
The staple is a material crucial to the artist’s practice and harkens back to early experimentations in three-dimensional form. Resembling building models, they cleverly replicate many of the ideas in the lens-based works and paintings as well as formal aspects of composition, color, and form.
Augmenting the sculptural works in the exhibition is Iranna’s engagement with the digital manipulation of images stemming from classical and contemporary architecture. The artist takes pleasure in allowing this evidence of distortion by technology to remain visible in her work, to both refine and adapt the original details and to comment on man’s increasing dependence on technology for his own self-image.