Biraaj Dodiya, Moonis Ahmad Shah, Shailesh BR, Youdhisthir Maharjan

25 August 2021 – 24 September 2021
D-53 Defence Colony

Vadehra Art Gallery is pleased to announce a group exhibition titled The (Pro)found Object featuring artists Biraaj Dodiya, Moonis Ahmad Shah, Shailesh BR and Youdhisthir Maharjan.

From the orientations they take up or make up in our worlds, found objects – or what the French often refer to as objets trouvé – come into possession of intrinsic contexts and posit themselves with linguistic values, much like artworks themselves. Once pursued by an artist’s insightful acknowledgement of their immanent or interpreted meanings and the roles they play in life’s experiences, these objects can reflect a renewed artistic outlook veering on powerful metaphors of making and creation. In effect, objects maintain an inert psychology framed by parameters of identification, nomenclature, utility or symbolism. Their objectivity is retained by the context they appear to us in, urging an aesthetic, emotive or sensitized response in the viewer, who promptly and profoundly becomes involved in the production of meaning.

The (Pro)found Object celebrates an artist’s reverent curiosity for curios through the recent works and practices of four exciting contemporary artists. These artists engage with a speckled roster of found objects from published books and appropriated telegrams to personal relics and everyday objects, illustrating a sensory intellectualism necessary for transfiguring dispositions of identity into interactive archives of persons, time and place yielded through collective access. Working in regions across the world, Shailesh, Dodiya, Ahmad and Maharjan deliberate on form and function as much as translations of meaning from each of their activations, weaving expanded notions of materials and meditative processes into traditional collage, painting and sculpture, therein transgressing the otherwise measured interplays between art and its utilitarian faculties.