PANAJI.- Sunaparanta Goa Centre For The Arts in partnership with the
Ishara Art Foundation is pleased to present Growing Like A Tree: Sent A Letter, a curatorial debut by Bunu Dhungana and Sadia Marium Rupa. The exhibition began on December 14th, 2022 and will continue through May 15th, 2023.
The collaboration between the two organisations provides a unique opportunity to witness path-breaking curatorial directions in the field of contemporary art within the subcontinent. Marking the third iteration of the exhibition initially curated by artist Sohrab Hura at Ishara Art Foundation in Dubai in 2021, the show expands on Hura’s collective journeys with practitioners across geographic borders. The exposition in Goa furthers Ishara’s and Sunaparanta’s commitment to supporting the burgeoning art scene from region both locally and internationally.
Growing Like A Tree: Sent A Letter comprises of photography, artist-books, texts, films, video and sound installations that reflect the complex and imbricated histories of South Asia and the world. Bringing together new and previously presented works, the curation pushes the boundaries of contemporary image-making as modes of address that offer a changing map of interconnected practices.
The title of the exhibition is inspired from Dayanita Singh’s work Sent A Letter (2007) that was exhibited as a citation in the first iteration of the show. Expanding on the idea that an unopened photo-book can enfold within it diaries, exhibitions and correspondences, Growing Like A Tree: Sent A Letter returns to this source to evoke the tactile act of composing letters. It gathers images and sounds as dispatches from artistic journeys across different contexts, highlighting the shared moments of nurture, growth, decay, pollination and memory-making. As described by the curators, “we find a paper, pen and envelope. We address, we pause and sometimes write many drafts until we find our expression. Not every letter is destined to make its way to the intended receiver. Some remain undelivered, some are lost along the way and others only reach their destination after an unanticipated lag in time while the world around them has completely changed.”
Carrying on the curatorial methodology from the past, the exhibition is rendered as a site of continuous transformations. At Sunaparanta, new voices fade in while existing ones linger on as residues, and others fade out into silence. Different practices are assembled as clusters, nodes, signals and notations connected through echo-locations and synapses. Jarring metallic sounds, flickering heartbeats, whooshing of blood and stormy seas form the sensorial landscape of the show that has travelled from one port city of Dubai to the next in Goa. Seen together, they convey the fragile yet resilient network of interdependence shared among artists.
The ensemble of artists and collectives in the exhibition includes Aishwarya Arumbakkam, Vinita Barretto, Uma Bista, Dolly Devi, Shaheen Dill-Riaz, Pooja Gurung & Bibhusan Basnet, Alana Hunt, Ipshita Maitra, Farah Mulla, Nida Mehboob, Jaisingh Nageswaran, Ali Monis Naqvi, Gaurang Naik, Sarker Protick, Sathish Kumar, The Packet, Priyadarshini Ravichandran, Rajee Samarasinghe, Suneil Sanzgiri, Sylvia Schedelbauer, Prasiit Sthapit, Maryam Tafakory, Avani Tanya and Zainab, along with a citation of Dayanita Singh’s Sent A Letter. With site-specific notations by Sohrab Hura, his role as a curator tunes out with the third iteration inviting new curatorial voices that proliferate the growing of the tree into a forest.
