MUMBAI: In a profession spanning three a long time, Kerala-born, Mumbai-based artist TV Santosh’s artwork has typically cited histories of violence, injustice, battle, terrorism and media propaganda.

The 55-year-old artist in his present, ‘History Lab and the Elegy of Visceral Incantations’ , on on the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, gives an incisive commentary on the present social and political crises. “Even before you physically step outside, the world comes to your home through various news reports. They act as our extended vision of the outside world that eventually becomes part of our everyday life,” causes Santosh.

Thus, conflicts and violence grow to be part of our on a regular basis expertise.

A watercolour work depicting a televised battle, titled, ‘When world enters your home’, is a placing instance. “The work is more about how the turbulent outside world bleeds into our drawing room through television channels. But here, it is a drawing room with a bunch of Ashoka plants in the background, with the hope of healing associated with it,” explains Santosh, including: “The usual protagonist has gone somewhere without switching off the television. The long table in the work too is a recurring image in my works. Once it was directly associated with da Vinci’s ‘The last supper’. It might have evolved into something else, but it still retains a sense of enigmatic prophecy that Christ had said during his last supper.”

The work emerges from the silent observations and conversations Santosh has with himself in an try to understand the violence-obsessed world we inhabit.

A more in-depth have a look at the textual content one reads within the work, ‘The protagonist with his unending monologue’, reveals a small write-up Santosh had jotted down, “at some point of self-talking.” According to him, the work is a pessimist’s view of the world by way of his tinted glass that brings out its darker facet. “It is a kind of monologue which is not about the personal worries but rather angst about the world; why no one learns anything from history, and why war is a constant,” says Santosh. “It is an act of sharing a kind of monologue that a theatre artiste would have effectively performed on the street.”

With the performative component, Santosh revisits a time in Kerala within the mid-80s, when he carried out as an actor and a mere spectator of historic injustices. In the work, he urges the viewer to ponder and maintain a dialogue, stating, “My attempt is to understand why history is infested with stories of conflicts and war, which is almost like an endless chain of actions and reactions, perplexing dynamics that often exposes the darker side of humanity,” he says. “But when you look at things from a larger humanist point of view, you realise that there is always an alternative way; a solution to all the unrest the world is dealing with.”

One of the sculptures on this present, titled, ‘History lab IV’, is a couple of strategy of understanding historical past from the angle of progress, as outlined by industrial and technological development, and the way these developments in flip grow to be yardsticks to measure the extent of injury attributable to man in opposition to its personal variety. “The history of war could be read as a parallel phenomenon to the development of weapons technology. History has its multiple complex narratives,” says Santhosh.

‘History lab and the elegy of visceral incantations’ comprising 31 artworks has been within the making for the final 5 years, exploring the overarching theme of historic injustices by way of a variety of fabric. “Watercolour process is a kind of balancing act between control and accidents. Before I paint, I work on the pre-image by staging the central image of the protagonist. Like in a one-act play wherein the protagonist interacts with objects that determine the progress of its narrative, I choreograph the act of the protagonist in order to shape-shift his identities through the history and its landmark events,” says Santosh of his course of.

From a military personnel to a political prisoner, from an activist to a sufferer of violence, he transforms himself to inform tales with the help of numerous props, together with a rat lure, weapons, bones and even prosthetics. In many senses, Santosh’s complicated inventive course of is his private journey, ensuing from a steady dialogue at numerous ranges of image-making outlined by the supplies, strategies and different linguistic techniques concerned. “What I’m addressing right here is a few of the questions that we are able to ask at any level in historical past, but they’ll at all times be related: ‘Who is the real enemy, after all?”

‘History lab and the elegy of visceral incantations’ might be seen at Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum until February XXX, 2024.