THE EDIT DRAWER 

Clark House investigates the broad context of the Drawing as a conceptual  , political and theoretical act.  Personal Histories are privileged to announce complex relationships artist hold with their practice.  How the editing of various elements through inclusion and erasure constitutes art work?  What are the inabilities and abilities at drawing?  What constitutes a drawing?  Which colours and materials allow its place and space?  How is Drawing a radical medium in a contemporary that dictates spontaneity ?

Yogesh Barve uses a drawing machine ,  scripting alphabets as a conceptual script,  a row of box shaped sculptures become elements of perspectives he draws onto leather.  Amol K Patil uses drawing as a residue of his performances that etch certitudes of memory of his childhood,  father and social movements.  Tejswini Sonawane uses the same drawings to etch animals that are skinned to depict human unkindness, their expressions mimic hers.  Saviya Lopes uses sonographs of her body specially her brains and abdomen  as drawings to reject religious misogyny , but also to humour the norms of patriarchy.  Naresh Kumar has been drawings the millions of bodies in performance on the streets of Paris onto sheets of paper that study society and economics,  how displacement brings bodies that replicate gestures from the home.  Poonam Jain calculates complex numbers into drawings that require logic and thought but also acceptance of Jaina circles of life.  Sudheer Rajbhar cuts rubber mats with a  surgery knife alongside a wikipedia text on Dalit discrimination.  Aman Negi recreates a neighborhood  Hair Saloon from the Kochi Muziris Biennale that he was part of and a collaboration with a cobbler from outside the Sir JJ School of Art.  Shiva Gor has made portraits of his community , people on the move Banjaras as an anthropological gaze , a romantic perspective in which Gypsies are often depicted in museums.  Fatma Amanoui and Sumesh Sharma collaborate with Omar Fassatoui where they translate the writings on De-colonisation by Iqbal Ahmed to Arabic which Amanoui then calligraphs using Henna on stolen sheets of paper from the children’s activity session room at the  MUCEM ,  Marseille.  Sumesh Sharma and Estel Fonseca collaborated with a Kurdish sculptor at the Vieux Port of Marseille who etched the Gitane sympol on a stone brought from the Saintes-Maries de la Mer. At the Vieux Port of Marseille Fatma Amanoui and the unamed Kurdish sculptor run petty trades which include Fatma’s Henna drawings for five euros onto the hands of others.

 They consider themselves artists much like the artists of Clark House , paranoia in an art world that inherently encloses itself by barriers of class,  language and wealth , manifests constantly often needing art history as a cudgel to define a space.  The rejection of drawing in the last decade arrived with the proliferation of art programs in expensive American and British universities that did not need you to excel in the plastic art to be able to claim artist authorship.  Among the privileged students a few used this overture to make works that had profound aesthetical,  political and historical resonance.  With a world closing its doors to debates , a political conservatism on the rise and disappearing art market,  the drawing is being fetishized again , black and white ink renditions of modernist buildings serve collectors well as well as funding agencies of governments who do not want activism in museums and biennales.  This is a manifesto show on drawing as a medium , much like Parashar Naik dissolve surfaces by removing layers of ink , but not to serve abstraction but to provide a coded story for interpretation.  Ranjeeta Kumari uses her drawings to provide a personal history of contextual feminism , on that is not available to you when you are the daughter of privilege and she is able to explain her surroundings with much clarity.  Mark Coombs came to Clark House and made drawing with the stills caught on a 16mm camera,  which were then presented as photographs that could be rolled as a film digitally.  Drawings do not have a specificity of medium,  visual or aesthetics , Iqbal Ahmed drew with words , therefore by using the same thin lines as Nasreen Mohameddi , Yogesh Barve does not inhabit her context or inherit her space.  Because each one of us draws our life.

Sumesh Sharma

Paris 2017