Relation Between Black and blood

2015 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

26,5 x 21,5 cm each

Naresh Kumar

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“Relation between Black and blood” explores the connection between performance, installation and representation. The artist’s use of watercolour is inherited from Mughal miniature painters who migrated from Delhi to the East India Company on the Ganges for the opium trade. The Miniaturists used cheaply available transparent Mica to paint images of the water carrier, the cobbler, dancers, prostitutes, wanderers and god men. These were sold as souvenirs to an international market of visiting officials and were sought for in England as they documented the scenes of Britain’s colony. People travelled through these small watercolours and they became India’s first secular political form of art that depicted the public and not a court scene or an imperial victory. They were called the “Patna Qalam.” In “Relation between Black and Blood”, a series of 12 pages, Naresh Kumar evokes his first visit to Paris as a resident at the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Paris. He regains the tradition of “Patna Qalam” by finding ancient French documents in thrift stores and second hand book stores. Uprooted vibrantly floating bodies, a bursting moon across the pages, withdrawing into itself; all evokes a journey to the end of the night and the harsh condition of eternal migration. The watercolours pose reflections on identity, movement and transformation. In talking about everyday life, the artist records daily facts of a past time to construct a colonial archive and undermine its significance and validity today.

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Naresh Kumar (b. 1988, India) is interested in the performance of the mundane in everyday life and considering how it can be represented in art. Often, his drawings act as scripts to his performances. With a focus on migration, the artist negotiates spaces of harmony, disparity and conformity within a city to understand the individual in the masses. Kumar’s experience migrating to the city of Patna, in India’s eastern state Bihar where he studied at the Patna College of Arts & Crafts, then to the city of Agra, where he was faced with his existence in a provincial art college, to Delhi where encountered his own identity as an migrant to the city from an impoverished part of India and lastly to Paris, where Indian culture is pocketed in certain areas of the city. The artist discusses the recurring act of movement as it relates to migration by incorporating performances to installations allowing the gaze to be performed by the artist himself and the spectator.

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Colors:

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• identity.n.01
• migration.n.01
• colonialism.n.01
• tradition.n.01
• history.n.01
• archive.n.01