12-25- July - Gallery OED

View HIDE AND SEEK online »

Anpu Varkey - Kajal Shah - Kavita Balakrishnan - Neema Vaghela - Pramodh Kumar - Prasad K P - Ruchin Soni - Roopasri - Sujil S - Sujith K S - Sumesh - Kamballur - Umesh Unni - Varun Cursetji

Concept note

Hide and seek is generally regarded as a child’s game. One can play it only in groups. This play involves no toys as such but one’s own expressions, body and all such possible identifying signals being kept away from notice while provoking and misguiding the one who is desperately running around to catch the other from a ‘hide-out’. It is a play with identity as an object/toy in disguise.

Such toying around is delightful with unconscious motivations for pleasure.  Scaled down in privilege, it provides access and ownership of anything in inverse proportions, huge and massive in handy forms or microbial objects in demonic size. There is implied something militant and subversive in spirit, in the sense of distorting an opaque reality in order to survive and get hold of it. We are generally made unaware of this militant quest within us for pleasurable access to a world so chaotic and inaccessible.

Play is often branded as nonsensical and vulnerable in the adult world and is supposed to inflict licentious indulgences suiting only to the life of ‘irresponsible ones’ and immature childhoods. For instance, toy-playing specifically is associated with a certain stage in life before getting initiated to a systematic elderly knowledge. They are even graded as ‘maturity / suitability markers’ in a child’s mental and physical capabilities (for children of 1 to 3 years of age or 5 to 7 years of age etc. as enlisted in the literature generally provided by the industry that produces and packages it). Thus, hurriedly one graduates to a ‘toy / play -less’ state of affairs. But the absence of play is an obstacle to the development of healthy and creative individuals. It is also believed that play is necessary for mastering emotional traumas or disturbances.

So, whenever need occurs to hide seek and survive, it puts us in very ‘embarrassing’ ‘caught silly’ ‘amoral’ ‘vulnerable’ ‘minimal’ and ‘nonsense’ situations.

‘Hiding’ is at once about ‘revealing’ so as to continue playing because hiding desires by default a seeking other – a seeking viewer to find it from the hide out.  It reveals a creative situation against the rules of all that are ‘make believe’, sophisticated, regimental and alienating.

Curatorial intention here is to identify some such chips among us, multiple small catchers of pleasures playing a sort of conceal-reveal game through their works. Art object is a potential toy, the marker of profoundly idiosyncratic and ‘quantum states’ of artistic subjectivity.

Yours truly,
Kavitha Balakrishnan

View HIDE AND SEEK online »