Mequitta Ahuja and Pooja Iranna Exhibition
Aicon Gallery
This event has ended.
Aicon presents Mequitta Ahuja’s second major solo exhibition, Black-word, & Pooja Iranna’s Silently Continuing.
While Ahuja is best known for her large-scale self-portraits, In Ahuja’s 2020 exhibition with the gallery Ma, the artist expanded her representation to include the image of her mother. In this new body of work, Ahuja goes further, centralizing images of her 19th century Black ancestors as she imagines them from documentary evidence including photographs of their descendants (the artist inherited nearly one-thousand photographs from her grandmother), letters and written descriptions in government documents. By setting her own image to the side while centralizing images and words of or about her ancestors, Ahuja’s new work simultaneously marks a radical departure from her oeuvre and its logical extension. In Black-word, Ahuja retains her signature themes: identity, autobiography, the creative imagination and history—both personal and painterly. She references the classical marriage portrait, paintings of the Christian holy family including the breastfeeding Madonna, and, using a strategy of medieval and renaissance art—scrolling ribbons of text “banderoles” that further animate and relate the stories depicted, Ahuja tells the story of her maternal lineage, claiming both her family story and the story of the Western figurative tradition as hers.
The artist will be in attendance.
Silently Continuing…
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.
Media
Schedule
from January 06, 2023 to February 11, 2023
Opening Reception on 2023-01-06 from 18:00 to 20:00