Experimenter presents Ground Control, a solo retrospective of the artist’s works at their Colaba outpost.
Ground Control presents woven paintings and their drawings, that were especially crucial in Raja’s practice. The works on view were woven by master weaver, Dipak Haldar, in close collaboration with Raja, on double-weft handlooms in Phulia, West Bengal. He was interested in their translation, the slippages in the transformation of form, from drawing to painting to scanning to weaving on the looms in India and back on stretchers in his studio in Brooklyn as woven paintings – from art to craft and from paper to image to thread.
Kanishka Raja straddled multiple worlds simultaneously. Acutely erudite in music and equally conversant in literature, politics, philosophy and history, he was an artist who could lead the viewer to enter his work from different points of view and emerge from it with several kaleidoscopic visions of how we may understand our world. Ground Control sheds light on Raja’s multiform practice, underscoring a constant pursuit in plurality of thought, materials and processes that held influential positions in his life and work.
Kanishka Raja (1969 – 2018) was born in Calcutta, lived and worked in New York and Kolkata.