BySukant Deepak

February 20, 2020 (IANSlife) The group exhibition titled "Bakhiya", being held at Threshold Art Gallery in the city till March 8 explores the resilience and tenacity of the human spirit to survive against seemingly insurmountable odds. Artists Achia Anzi, Gargi Raina, Priya Ravish Mehra, Rajendra Tiku, Rubaba Haider and Yael Bartana came together to share their stories of difficult journey and how they learned from the same.

Bakhiya literally means stitching/suturing the garment by Sufi Darvesh (mendicant) symbolises the meditative activity of not letting things fall apart. The textile traditions of Kantha, Sujani, Rafoo come from a similar philosophy of re-purposing rather than discarding.

Tunty Chauhan, the curator, says, "This exhibition serves as a subtle reminder to the viewer to embrace and appreciate all aspects of life and revisit our conception of beauty/desirability not as the absence of imperfection but rather, by recognising those very flaws as an inextricable part of what make us wiser it carries connotations of fully existing within the moment, of acceptance, of equanimity amid changing conditions. This is the essence of surrender."

Artist Rajendar Tiku, in his artwork titled 'Snow Flowers' in white marble, wood and glass shows a flower that blossoms only after the snow melts in Kashmir. They symbolise hope and anticipation of spring. When he had to move out of Kashmir, this flowers gave him the hope that good times will come. It has been intentionally placed in a box, to indicate the kind of transition that migrants experience where they carry their memories from one place to another.

Rubaba Haider (a Hazara women now settled in Australia) through her work, Both light and shadow are the dance of love (Rumi) I' tries to create a space where gendered issues are explored. The use of threads, fabrics and needles symbolise these intimate wounds and tears as well as the upheavals to various relationships throughout life. The personal, familial and community conflicts are shown through the use of unraveling threads, different types of knots, and needles.

Achia Anzi's 'Colonial Times' is a text-based project which is composed of extracts from five poems written by five different poets: the Jewish philosopher, Judah Leon Abravanel who was expelled from Spain , the nationalist Indian poet of Portuguese origin, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio , Martiniqian poet, Aime Cesaire, who was one of the founders of the Negritude movement, the Romanian Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor, Paul Celan , and the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish . While the poems belong to different times and diverse spaces, they were all conceived from the margin of modernity and responded to the experience and logic of colonialism. Besides, they all take issue, and not accidentally, with the notion of time

Gargi Raina's 'Ayenakari' are from the concept of initial art of creating pattern with broken glass. Many ages ago, mirrors made of polished metal were made and used in Iran till glass mirrors were first shipped to Iran from Russia. When the crates arrived, it was found that the mirrors en route had broken. It was then from a shattered world of glass, from chaos, that the karigars brought order - - they reconstructed the fragments into intricate geometric, mosaic patterns containing and reflecting brilliant light. In a whole mirror, the world or the self is reflected as whole. But in the fragmented world of Ayeneh Korobari, the world is reflected back in its multiple fragmented form. And It is from the broken that the whole is made. They look at life through the fragments of broken glass ... creating patterns as they do through a Kaliedoscope 

Manisha Gera Baswani's 'Whirlpool' showcases the seemingly unwelcome periods of time. They come disguised, sometimes as violent gusts of wind, screaming brazenly through the front door or slipping in surreptitiously through the back.

Priya Ravish Mehra's works are based on her personal journey. She uses rafoogari as a metaphor of visible and invisible traditional darning to invoke sudden, unexpected and violent rupture in our daily experience of the apparently seamless, stable, reliable order of things. 

Yael Bartana's 'A Declaration' is a channel video and sound installation which talks about the invisible border between Tel Avis and Jaffa. 

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Sukant Deepak can be contacted at sukant.d@ians.in