Ankur Yadav is an artist and researcher based in Rajasthan, India. Part of their practice is ever-evolving and nomadic, traversing various issues and concerns in a continual journey of finding methods and materials for producing multiple forms of subjectivities of sustenance. Recently, engaging with people, stories, and incidents within the community have become critical to their practice, through works that seek to address the social oppressions on individuals stemming from patriarchal structures. They also engage in researching alternative modes of economy involving practices of sharing. In other projects, questions about the exploitation of land and people by creating a situation of viewing near mining operations are probed, and an earlier series looks closely at the systems of hierarchical and dominating colonial knowledge structures by constructing an alternate space of ambiguity. A graduate of Fine Arts from Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, he pursued his postgraduate studies in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts in the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara
Proposal
For the exhibition I plan to extend my queries on my ongoing practice that has been engaged with questions surrounding geontopower and elemental encounters. I will engage with the environmental elements to seek different perspectives and further the dialogues on the concerned issues of elemental encounter through posthuman bodies. My projects will consider water, earth, wind, fire as our posthuman body.
The project will base itself on object oriented ontology, exploring ancient elemental theories through sound, local games, and practices of foraging, fermentation among others. The project will attempt to look at the ancient and the diverse context to question Western metaphysics vis-a-vis the binaries between life and nonlife. It will look into the indigenous practices through the elemental encounter of water, earth, air, fire, wood, that makes out an alternate identity of post-human figures, generates a dialogue with supernatural entities, and blurs the normative borders of the ‘living’. This would be in order to explore alternative ways of experiencing environmental destruction and seek alternative elemental arrangements, with the hopes of triggering possibilities and a sense of obligation towards the world we participate in making.