ANUJAN EZHIKODE
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My work deals with cultural identity, displacement and memory. I am reinterpreting that familiar place which over time can't help but be altered and reimagined. As the past unwinds, there is a longing to reconnect. Connections once broken become retied and memories long hidden resurface. Color, images, and time all intersect with an absence of boundaries.
My earliest influences of Indian temple arts, folk and religious rituals, and classical music and dance fuels the narrative in my work. All of these art forms, especially my theatrical training, taught me the importance of having movement, light, and color in my visual vocabulary.
By using materials that also have history, whether layering image over image, working with recycled paper, found materials, or borrowed fabrics each contributes, in its own way, to this idea of the past unraveling. They bring an already existing personal imprint.
Silhouetted figures evoke those distant memories, which constantly resurface to be confronted and rediscovered. Piece by piece, I regroup, eliminate and reimagine. Faces and torsos are facing each other in shadow. Back and forth, face to face, inside and out, in defiance of their confined spaces. Anchored in their own organic environment, witnesses to this passage of time.
In my works on paper, I cut pages from car, fashion, and design brochures and weave them into different sizes. This adds strength and texture and at the same time makes a grid pattern which compartmentalizes the commercial images. On top of those fragmented, restructured fantasies I recreate my own narratives and then use bubble imagery as a metaphor for the invisible barrier that separates us from understanding the past. This bubble layer often resembles the surfaces created by rice paste used in the ritual and theater arts of India.
Flow and fragmentation, obscuring and revealing; my work explores the way we are confronted by a world that seems veiled to us. Words and images are hidden. We are well aware of what lies behind the curtain; it is part of our memory. You can walk through it, it is always visible...you are only adding your own new layers, one at a time. We are only barricaded by a transparent space.