Pragati Offset, Hyderabad, 2006, 140 pp
Nataraj Sharma’s new body of work, the fruit of the STPI residency, once again ricochets off his concerns – the historical, geographical, political and economical realities of today. He continues his exploration of fraught relationships between urbanisation, the landscape and the human presence at the interstices of modernity, simultaneously ephemeral and enduring. He investigates the overlapping spaces of memory, desire and landscape in his works as well as the binary of labour and leisure. From the macro, universal exploration, one can trace the resonance of his personal crisis – of seeing oneself inextricable from the web of urban sprawl, brooding alone in the concrete jungle, probing our own reality of today where an individual must repeatedly face an undeniable sense of rootlessness, alienation and anonymity.
With reflections by Ranjit Hoskote and artist timeline by Gayatri Sinha.
