I Know Nothing of the End

Sudarshan Shetty’s work employs an approach that entices the viewer through manipulations of symbolic meaning. Conventions of entertainment provide a basis for a restaging and recoding of objects where techniques of display are appropriated while the mechanics of their working remain in full view.

Shetty explores the social life of objects and their capacity to serve as historiograpic witness, to articulate the problematic psychological space that exists between practices rooted in the contested territory of tradition and the general tendencies of contemporary activity.

Shetty explores notions of social loss through works that investigate the formal presentation of collective mourning and commemoration. Cenotaphs and memorial monuments are replicated in wood where the laborious process of carving the forms by hand echoes traditional rituals concerning grief and remembrance. These works hinge on a fictional death that forms the basis for a theatrical staging of questions aimed at the very idea of engagement in the role of an artist.

The human body is constantly redrawn as a physical presence, embodied through constructions in installations and the material symbolism of the artist’s objects. Emotional states of love and grief, ecstasy and inertia, seriousness and play, are taken as absolutes before being reshuffled and choreographed, with theatricality and artificiality serving as techniques with which to unravel notions of necessity and absurdity.