artist statement
The ‘Kindness’ exhibition celebrated the 20-years of establishment within the ‘Australian and India Cultural Council’. It promoted cultural and social relations between the nations, and explored the embodiment of this throughout the arts. Conceptually, the idea of coded messages and layers of hidden meaning resonated perfectly within this exhibition, aptly expressing the complex yet rewarding nature of cross-cultural communication.
An Eye for an Eye uses anamorphic text to effectively portray the layers found within India and Australia’s cultural relationship. The text blurs boundaries between recognizable words and abstract beauty, using Ghandi’s quote to innovatively harness a code and project emotional depth and wisdom. This medium provides a dual platform to not only convey words, but asks the viewers to look deeper in order to obtain the message – one of the resonating concepts within the cultural exchange.
exhibition details
Kindness / Udarta: Australia-India Cultural Exchange is a project in both India and Australia to celebrate twenty years of cultural exchanges between visual artists, writers and musicians. It acknowledges the initiatives of the Australia-India Council in the arts and coincides with the 2012 celebration of the Australia-India Year of Friendship.
The project including the exhibition, music performances and literary discussions were first staged at The India habitat Centre, New Delhi in March, 2012 and broadcast live to Australia through RMIT Gallery, AIC and ABC websites. The exhibition has since reached Australia, showing at Canberra’s Department of Finance and Trade in May and Melbourne’s RMIT June to August.
Taking account of the current state of Australia India relations, artists were invited to reflect on their cultural exchange experiences, framed by notions of kindness. The resulting diverse body of work are all underpinned by goodwill and kindness or daya between India and Australia.
