Manjot Kaur (b.1989, India) inquires the social, cultural, political and anthropological concerns of population, environment, and sustenance by employing the tools of absurdity, uncertainty, randomness and abstraction. She navigates between drawing, painting, installation, video, sound and performance.

Currently, she is artist in residence at Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht for the year 2020- 21. She has been an artist in residence at 1. Shanthiroad, Bangalore, 2019; Unidee, Citadellarte – Fondazione Pistolleto, Italy on full scholarship by Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation, India, 2018; Museo Casa Masaccio Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea, San Giovanni Valdarno (Italy) – a cross-institutional program with Clark House Initiative, Mumbai, 2018; Khoj International Artists’ Association – Peers18, New Delhi, 2018. She has received State Award from Punjab and Chandigarh Lalit Kala Akademi (State Academies of Art), Chandigarh, India, 2019, 2018, 2017 and 20.

 

PLANTS ARE THE NEW CHILDREN

“Can I show a landscape as the protagonist of an adventure in which humans are only one kind of participant?

Over the past few decades, many kinds of scholars have shown that allowing only human protagonists into our stories is not just ordinary human bias; it is a cultural agenda tied to dreams of progress through modernization. There are other ways of making worlds. Anthropologists have become interested, for example, in how subsistence hunters recognize other living beings as “persons” that is, protagonists of stories. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? Yet expectations of progress block this insight: talking animals are for children and primitives . Their voices silent, we imagine well-being without them. We trample over them for our advancement; we forget that collaborative survival requires cross-species coordinations. To enlarge what is possible, we need other kinds of stories – including adventures of landscape.”

Text by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing | from the book: The Mushroom at the End of the World, Page 155-156

Gouache, watercolour and pen on Wasli paper, 21.5 x 16 in | 54.61 x 40.64, 2020

 

Gouache, watercolour and pen on Wasli paper, 21.5 x 16 in | 54.61 x 40.64, 2020

Gouache, watercolour and pen on Wasli paper, 21.5 x 16 in | 54.61 x 40.64, 2020

 

Gouache, watercolour and pen on Wasli paper, 21.5 x 16 in | 54.61 x 40.64, 2020

COPYRIGHT © 2017. INLAKS SHIVDASANI FOUNDATION. JOMEL & ZOYA KATHAWALA