Artist Shibu Chand’s exhibition, Text/Context portrays prevailing discomforts and disappearances

Shibu Chand's Text/Context exhibition showcases art on unconventional mediums, exploring themes of discomfort, loss, and nature's symbiosis.

“Art is the aesthetics of coexistence and struggle,” reads a rectangular white board placed beside the door to Shibu Chand’s latest art exhibition Text/Context at Alliance Française de Trivandrum. On entering, scrolls of illustrations painted on mediums ranging from a stripped sky-blue lungi to a machine-made khadi cloth hang down the off-white walls of the gallery.

However, Shibu’s experiments with his paintings were born out of scarcity rather than choice. As the world was forced into a slumber following the pandemic, artists like Shibu were compelled to consider alternatives to the traditional canvas due to a shortage of art supplies.  

“I started painting on the lungi, then I found it interesting, and I moved on to other fabrics,” says Shibu.  

The curation contains 14 artworks drawn or painted across different mediums at different sizes which were created by the artist within a span of three years from 2021 to 2024. It is Shibu’s seventh solo exhibition and his third in Thiruvananthapuram. This exhibition contains works from his Limited Spaces series and Situations series, some of which have been put on display at a group art exhibition in Jehangir Museum, Mumbai. 

The four paintings displayed from the Limited Spaces series, discuss themes of discomfort and disappearance.  

One of the works, which uses acrylic on a printed sheet, was inspired by an incident when Shibu spotted bisons in front of his house in Panayamuttam, Thiruvananthapuram. Shibu says the animals have left their natural habitat in the forest and entered the towns out of discomfort.

Shibu also portrays loss through two paintings in the same series as well. One of the paintings portrays an image reminiscent of a sacrificial setting and in the other, the artist evokes an image of the kaavus (sacred groves). “A lot of things are disappearing from our midst. Mountains and hills are disappearing. The kaavus are disappearing,” he says. Shibu adds how the painting done on a blue lungi derived inspiration from his research for his dissertation on Kalamezhuthu, the ritual of using powdered colour to draw ritualistic patterns on the floor.