Madhusudhanan

Madhusudhanan

Text: Nancy Adajania
The Registry of Things Past: 'Neither you are aware,
nor the police'

Conversation: Madhusudhanan and T. V. Santhosh

Softbound 228 pages with more than 161 colour plates
Pages with text 61
Published by The Guild
ISBN: 978-93-80520-10-0

“Among his recent paintings, we see the calisthenics of history performed in a time of precarity: Lenin’s head being airlifted or carried on a wheel barrow of inflatable sand bags (war and genocide having become recurrent features in a post-communist world) or the symbol of heroism and power, the equestrian statue blown off its pedestal. But then we find this glowing robe miraculously suspended in the air next to Lenin, as he exits the pages of history. Is this a new ideological garb waiting for its wearer? Or is it a robe of redemption, a shirt sloughed off like old skin in Piero della Francesca’s ‘The Baptism of Christ’? Is it too much to hope for deliverance from the endless cycle of death and death? When the books burn at Fahrenheit 451, do we see the spectres of Indian Emergency or Nazism? Does the scission in Vasco da Gama’s foreshortened portrait project our schizoid post-colonial selves, held together by a bunch of tasseled bulbs?” - Nancy Adajania

An internationally acclaimed film-maker and artist, Madhusudhanan’s artistic practice flows seamlessly across media. His fascination with images, especially the advent of the moving image and its place in human history, is refl ected in a series of fi lms, paintings, drawings, video art and sculptural installations. The feature film ‘Bioscope’ (2008) is one of his foremost works. It is based on the journey of the then new art form of cinema during the colonial India. He is deeply concerned with issues of war, colonisation, India’s fi lm history and manmade borders. Marxism and Buddhism have been decisive infl uences on his art. ‘The Marx Archive: The Logic of Disappearance’ is an ongoing project comprising of drawings, sculptural installations and video. From this series, 90 charcoal drawings were shown at the Kochi Muziris Biennale, 2014, curated by Jitish Kallat. Selection from the same series and a new series called ‘The Penal Colony’ were shown at the Venice Biennale, 2015, curated by Okwui Enwezor. His fi lms have been awarded several international and national awards and have been shown extensively in film festivals, art galleries, museums, including Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.