(Un)Common Concerns

Grocery bags filled with calculations- mostly subtractions, clothes designs on onion, ATM Slips, text messages that keep bumping into a salaried person's cellphone, or a wallet and common food like Wada-Paaw... constitute a language of the everyday that Chandrakant Ganacharya has seen in the city and elsewhere. It finds it's due place in his work, and boils down to hunger, struggle, and the powers that form the lure and lore of this everyday. 

Artist : Chandrakant S Ganacharya

Beneath the overtly middle-class concerns readable in Chandrakant's work, there are layers of meaning common not only to a class, or not only to humans. Everyday stuggles can be a reality for a turtle, a frog, a lizard, an octopus, or a jellyfish.The artist places these animal and insects, graphically under the onion that has been sitting on a throne - thanks to hoarders and their political bosses.

Chandrakant's installations are eloquent about absence, though each of them looks visually abundant. Each ATM slip digs deeper in your bank balance. The text messages bluntly say : you have (only this much of) money or you will need a loan to fulfill your dream. 

Recent work by Chandrakant S Ganacharya

The artist further explores these absences by mock recollection and re-enactment.The redundant coins with denominations like 20, 10, five, two and one paise are now executed in terracotta. They were once there, three decades ago, knows every Indian in his fourties, as the work makes the viewer think about a civilization as old as Mohenjodaro or Lothal. Another re-enactment, of the verbal wisdom about hunger, a full meal or acute lack of it , comes to the viewer as speech bubbles, made out of rusted steel dishes of various shapes and sizes. Proverbs, sayings and thoughts in various languages of the subcontinent are literally dished out. 

Recent work by Chandrakant S Ganacharya

Chandrakant's graphic representations, as one in the work titled " Krishna Chhaya" evoke literal clues to black money. However, the artist has a silent mode. he makes us look silently at the row made of gold-plated peanuts and pins... ants, obviously... or is it us? 

The concerns in Chandrakant's work may look common as they reach us. But once we ponder over them, they are not common.

# MONEY * FOOD @ LIFE, 
Jehangir Hirji Art Gallery, 
1st floor, Fort, Mumbai,

Inauguration at 5 pm to 6 pm
on 15 th Feb 2016,

Chandrakant Ganacharya
Mumbai