Breath
Arun KS
Invisible. Inaudible. Intangible.
Seeking a natural consciousness that is outside and beyond our body remains at the heart of Arun KS’ recent works; to seek, feel and express it in gestures, while the mind is devoid of intention or image, or prejudice. What is produced then is material and gesture as image. In drawing and making from this capacious, free mind is to prevent its instinct for manipulation. This awareness of being, of touching and feeling, and making without the intention of making, become devices for KS to practice this consciousness. If only we could give our all to time, without the worldly expectation of making time productive, we’d see and respond to the world differently.
I. Breath; Earth.
Pieces of the earth, its minerals and materials are divined by hand and laid into fragments. They hold within them traces of landscape in dust and stone, husk and hand.
An alchemy of earthen material is nurtured by hand and packed in air-tight bags. With time and age, a transformation occurs - a fermentation perhaps leading elements to unified stability. This making by hand, mulching, and bringing together materials in measure is in itself a process in collective preservation. However it is one involving chance, instinct, experience and most importantly play. To feel these elements as you bring them together and let them spill into one another also offers an embalmment devoid of synthetic toxicities. The essence is transferred from hand to material and material to hand - sweat and soil, soluble in water and air - in a continuous, considered fusion.
In Breath, Arun KS continues to dwell in considered, temporal processes. The form in itself arrives rather quickly and with faith in the material. This confidence is easy for the artist from having lived with and observed the material these past years. The arrival was preceded by many failed forms and months of gestation. This transitional period was very much a part of the “making” of the work.
KS drawings on paper are similar to the earth-works, with more pronounced colour work. Marks and motions slowly produce the tenacity of landscapes and ruins. This layering and spillage offers gestural clues of the body’s movement, occasionally offering a deceptive form. Everything was made but nothing was intended - and this is the consciousness he has been thinking about and seeking in recent years - of making with presence instead of preconceptions.
II. Gesture and a circle.
Etched onto walls of ancient caves and historical ruins, the once lush imagery is now barely perceptible with time and nature. Images have deteriorated into signs and slivers. KS sees possibility in this ruin of the absolute that may have once been associated with a belief or a purpose. In its excavated, reduced state it doesn’t bear an allegiance to its past iconography and offers an abstraction, a landscape perhaps.
KS works with his mind and body seeking a universal consciousness that is beyond the self. In turning his hands inward to or outward from the center, the body develops muscle memory and gestural possibility. This employment of the body in the making of material is key as is the resistance to visual and figurative clues. The image that we see as audiences is purely an image forming in our eyes and mind. Lines and patterns, signs and languages, petroglyphs and shrines - whatever your mind may divine.
It is a transformation from the act of seeing to the act of experiencing. This transformation is also afforded by light and how it touches the surface and how colour holds onto mark and wound. Sometimes a process of excavation by hand is undertaken to carefully accentuate a surface tension. These works command an intimacy to reveal its material and textural possibility.
III. Totem. Tower.
Arun KS is interested in the aesthetic possibility of Indian philosophy and how they can be read as exercises or methodologies outside of their socio-cultural or religious functions. He is interested in extracting relationships and codes of living and working with nature and its elements, looking at ‘rituals’ as recipes instead. This reversal of reverence into simple functionality is also to free materials and processes from the weight of histories and identities. In these he creates his own totems - precariously stacked and held by a fragment - weathered wood on concrete, upon clay, upon metal.
KS is a collector of materials as much as he is a maker of them. In found and made objects he is able to instill other visual histories outside of cultural codes. This seeming dissonance descends into complex situational harmony.
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Breath is also a departure from KS’s earlier body of works where mural-like tapestries were coded with abstracted religious materials. But it continues to remain with his need to challenge singular ideological frameworks and fascination with topographies. To feel material without associating divinity or ideology to it is to return it to its natural, primal, (somewhat) authentic form.
How do we move away from a sense of urgency and how do we refrain from relying on instinct? How do we “start to make something when you don’t want to make anything” but only want to feel the material and allow it to take its form?
There is also an active awareness of the mind and its ways. Our mind tends to learn and set patterns; of ways of dealing with life and material. To break from this is to consistently find new directions of touch and movement, performance and play. It is also to utilize confusion, doubt and uncertainty as productive, generative states.
Like colour milled from bark and rock, Arun KS is interested in the bodily, laboured production of material and exercises of patience and observation. Produced over years this body of work is then its temporal journey from idea to form. Material is also an organism - alive and breathing, porous, merging, forming, firming. It is then loaded onto frames and allowed to relinquish its water while holding its air.
Sometimes cracks emerge to allow breath.
Mario D’Souza
Born 1984 in Kerala, Arun K.S. attained a BFA at the Government College of Fine Arts in Thrissur, and an MFA at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda, where he also apprenticed with Gulammohammed Sheikh. Arun draws on long histories of religious belief. His work is suggestive of artisanal genealogies of painting and papermaking, and is enriched by its various and simultaneous affinities with sculpture, painting, scribal occasion and ritual performance. He was a recipient of the Nasreen Mohamedi Award 2012 and the Inlaks Scholarship 2013, and held his first solo exhibition at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai in 2013. In 2014, his work was shown at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Kerala Lalith Kala Akademi, Thrissur; Asvitha Art Gallery, Chennai; Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai; the India Art Fair, New Delhi, and Exhibit 320, New Delhi among other venues. He lives and works in Baroda.