The Saga of a Colony

Description

In this series of 9 works composed with old books and etched mirrors, the artist has fathomed into the pulse of the time, navigating through the past and immortalizing the moments and the emotions attached to it. The etched visuals on the mirrors, skillfully placed inside the hollow of the book’s body embody a memory where the personal history of the artist merges with the collective sensitivity. The work speaks on the changing notion of digitalization and urbanization through the change of the millennials and represents various objects of love and attachment from the book of time. The books were received by the artist through his familial lineage and with a strong conceptual framework, he depicts the objects from his years of growing up that poetically captures the essence of the time in a specific cultural context through cultural symbols.

 The visuals depict various socio-cultural and behavioral visuals of a timebook and also interact and question the viewers. The little, trendy habits of beautiful, simpler times like- playing the ‘snake’ game on your first small Nokia phone or traditional domestic customs like the holy leaves adorned on the door fronts of the houses, the coconut put in a cloth and hung on the ceiling for good luck, the habit of collecting small changes in the gullak (a piggy bank made out of clay, traditionally used in small towns and rural India), the bell of cycle or childhood games like Pittu (lagori/ seven stones) or that exciting moment of the flight of a coin toss before a neighborly afternoon cricket match- Praveer’s visuals portray the time saga of the colony of his growing up years, which perfectly captures the essence and beauty of small towns in India in the advent and during digitalization. One work in the series keeps the mirror as it is without any etching, and that’s an ever-evolving dialog with the viewer while the centerpiece hints toward an explosion, most likely a psychological one. The deluge of information colliding with the brain and mind is keeping humans on the edge of an ever-probable explosion, where it’s struggling to find their one true mind, swimming without directions in the sea of information. 

The individual pieces can be collected and the body of works can be collected as a series, as well.