28 JANUARY 2018 TO 1 MARCH 2018 | EXHIBITION

Every day one tries to answer the question that Ernest Renan asked in the year 1882, ‘What is a nation?’ One inserts through his postulations of the Nation being a daily plebiscite, a kind of doubt in the assertions of the ‘Machine-State’. The sites of failure that the Nation constructs every day are also by default the same references that produce the idea of the Nation itself.

Micro-subversions Playbook is an exhibition that enquires the nature of these everyday references. They take place in daily life, in the mundane as seen when one walks in a straight line but takes a detour not to avoid potential accidents but to discover the shadow of pink flowers on the parallel street. These lines and spaces are already marked with the positions we occupy. Identity, first used in mathematics, was a framework for measuring sameness, which then finds resonance in the mechanism of the Machine-State as an essential structure for consolidating power. The Nation, therefore, articulates its existence by uttering and then activating this very sameness through an interpellation of these identities. However, the Nation achieves its full potential when it simultaneously engages in forgetting. The pitfalls of identity are innumerable and richly wrought. Micro-subversions Playbook is an attempt to articulate the everydayness of identity itself with all its complex negotiations.

Collaborating artists:

Avni Sethi
Birender Yadav
Daisy Katta
Debanan Sasmal
G Mahesh
Jagrut Raval
Jithin Lal
Manju Rajak
Pinak Banik
Rajshri Goody
Raju Patel
Ranjeeta Kumari
Sarah Naqvi
Shiva Gor
Varunika Saraf