NAVIN THOMAS
Born in 1974 in Chennai, Navin Thomas now lives and works in Bengaluru. Thomas has formal training in graphic design and also holds a diploma in Cinematography from the Karnataka Film and Technical Training Centre, Bengaluru.
Thomas’s works have been included in numerous group exhibitions in prestigious institutions such as the 10th Anniversary Show at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (2020); ‘Flight of the Fabricator’, Munich, Germany (2017); ‘Bright Noise’, Lalit Kala Akademi (2014) and ‘Generation in Transition’, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2011). He has also exhibited at the Kochi- Muziris Biennale (2014) and EuropaliaIndia, Liege (2013–14).
Thomas is the recipient of a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts for his extended art practice towards a book on salvaged photo negatives (2013), The Skoda Prize for Contemporary Art (2012), and a grant from Sarai (CSDS) to make an audio map of busking performances at popular city railway stations (2003).
About The Work
Courtesy Green Nature Morte, Delhi
Reconstructed garden bench and street light Courtesy of Nature Morte, New Delhi“Fictional Symphony Halls” is the title of a group of architectonic models that are propped up on stilt-like legs. Complex and kinetic, each is its own folly, suggesting a theater or a temple, a spaceship or a birdhouse. Crafted from re-cycled wood, the works are technically complex, all with moving parts so that they can change over time.With the work entitled “we & you & us,” the artist explores the realm of built architecture and ecology. The park bench and street light become an integral part of the geography of natural landscapes, thereby rearranging and expanding old puritan ideas of the nature of human coexistence.