T.V SANTHOSH
Born in 1968 in Kerala, TV Santhosh lives and works in Mumbai. He obtained his graduate degree in sculpture from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan in 1994, and his master’s degree in sculpture from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Gujarat in 1997. A strong commentary on the current social and political crisis in the country, his art cites histories of violence, injustices, war, terrorism and media propaganda.
Santhosh’s most recent exhibit was at the first edition of the Bengal Biennale in Santiniketan, as part of the show, titled ‘Anka Banka: Through Cross-Currents’. His work has also been exhibited at the National Pavillion of Iran at the 56th Venice Biennale, Colombo Art Biennale, Das Kunstmuseum in Austria, Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Israel, the Havana Biennale, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Prague Biennale, among others.
About The Work
Courtesy of The Guild, Alibagh
In his work “History Lab III” Santhosh is dealing with the idea of understanding history through different narratives, various perspectives, and by meddling around with the information which may further problematize our perceptions about the idea of where did things gowrong. It is also a process of tracing back the nature of important events that changedthe course of our history. Here, this work is more like an apocalyptic vision of the world, an attempt to look into the future through the imprints of our turbulent past taken out from the history books and multitudes of imageries projected and filtered into our psyche through news reports of the present. It is more about a kind of prophetic imagination derived out of an attempt to understand the destructive elements that are deeply embedded in the dynamics of human psyche and its evolution. This work deals with an image of desolate and broken buildings, possibly destroyed in a war, attached with a timer device in countdown format that is set up for an approximate time of nearly seventy-nine years in relation to an average life expectancy of human beings on this planet.In his work.
“Obsolete Objects” Santosh comments on his personal, and by extension our collective, relationship with technology. As we have never seen before in the history of mankind, society is undergoing an enormous structural change forced by the technological advancement, even to the extant that man’s day to day affairs and his relationships with the world are defined and controlled by it.
Though on the one hand, technology has made hardships of manual jobs much easier to execute, even becoming instrumental in reshaping the social hierarchies and its power structure; on the other hand, it has made people more and more dependent on them, evento the extent of emotional attachment. Industrialization and urbanization have brought in a sense of alienation and existentialist crisis at an individual level, eventually reflecting it backto the society, making it more fragmented. The accelerated rate of technological and social change leaves people with no option but to be part of a race to catch up with their time,which is in a constant flux. Technology is fast progressing in a way, upgrading the existing systems, and in some cases even replacing the old one with a completely new system. In the process, the world is becoming more and more like a wasteland of obsolete electronic items. Today, we live in a world of use and throw-away culture. Nostalgia does not necessarily deal anymore with childhood experiences as of relation with electronic objects, in this super- industrial society. My generation lived through a period of transition, from the era of the radio to the iPod, revolutionizing our approach to listening music. Although, all these electronic gadgets have become obsolete and most of them are no longer in use or in their earlier form now.