Curated by OCA's director Marta Kuzma, the project takes the form of a dialogue between two works – And… (2007), a languorous serpentine rope produced from individual threads and needles that coils throughout the exhibition space to intercede the spectator's path and field of vision, and Best Cutting (2008), a display that combines a constructed newspaper, The Chronic Chronicle, overlaid by tailoring patterns.
Both works asymptotically share the support of a material line to formulate a postulate on space that undermines continuity and coherence to instead, privilege notions of contingency making unstable logical connectives and inferred certainties.
The project reverberates within a Euclidean space between the contiguous and the abstract underscoring the conceptual and narrative underpinnings within the respective works. The montage-based Best Cuttings, didactic and seemingly archival, set against And… as a cipher for the schema of alienation, points to the consciousness building central to Gowda's praxis.
The artist's integration of tactile elements – threads, hair, traditional kumkum dyes, patterns, weaving techniques, the imperceptible attention to meticulous detail – may provoke an instinctual interpretation within a material tradition of craft and textile making. Yet, to do so would inevitably short circuit the wider meaning of Gowda's practice that transposes these elements into social objects and practices located within a network of production and distribution framed in relation to India's socio-political legacy.
Gowda's work serves as a query into an India less familiar to wider art communities – an inquiry into the political and social intricacies – the complexities in, for example, the State of Uttar Pradesh in the northern region; the polemics around the Bharatiya Janata Party; the irony made apparent within the Best Bakery Case and the person of Zahira Sheikh, a witness of communal carnage later sentenced to a jail term; the expulsion of Taslima Nasreen from Bangladesh; the political successes of the Bandit Queen Phoolan Devi; the reflexive issues inherent to the land policy toward the rural poor.
Throughout, Gowda leans upon the theory of state as a code or measure to privilege the state versus the spiritual, the apolitical, if not altogether anti-political goal of moksa, as an absolute. For more, read here.