Solo Exhibition by Parag Tandel
AUTOPOLISPHILIA-2018
– Curated by Noopur Desai
Autopolisphilia connotes a sense of fixation with the city that one lives in, belongs to. It stands for a causal relationship with an imagined topography of the city that connects one with the landscape through cultural linkages and histories of the place. Parag’s connection with the city of Mumbai (and also Thane) reflects in his current series of drawings. His ‘thinking drawings’, as he calls them, illustrate the unrealized as well as contorted visual narrative of the urban landscape. The urban space lends itself to reverie: a mediator of images stimulating imagination.
CHRONICLE-2016
Solo Project at TARQ, Mumbai
Chronicle is Parag Tandel’s first solo exhibition at TARQ. In this exhibition, Tandel showcases a series of sculptures cast in resin that represent shapes and colours from memories of his childhood. The change in the seascape in Mumbai over the passage of time is essential to the artist’s life and practice, as a member of one of Mumbai’s original communities, the Koli community. His works in this show focus on ideas of ecology and migration through the vivid imagery of the creatures of the sea, both real and imagined. The sculptures invoke a mystical, almost mythical representation of underwater life, and engage the viewer in thought about how these changes may affect our immediate future. By using fantastical colours from his early experience, Tandel invites us to understand exactly what it is that we are doing to our planet every day.
According to Tandel, the materials and forms of everyday symbols he grew up with for the most part, manifest in his work. He says, “My work stems from the idea of using found objects, to reuse them, and then construct fresh entities. I inquire into the history as well as contemporary times of my community. I have grown up listening to chronicles of the past, which, for me, are almost fable-like and imaginative; I sense after years these fables are beginning to mount into myth, they are transforming into layers similar to the residue structures in our minds.”
PREGNANT ROOM-2010
Solo Project at Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai.
An allergic fishing net is an outcome of toxic waste discharged in the ocean. I live in a fishing village. One day I saw fishermen coming out of fishing wharf with this fishing net etched by toxins in the river creek, brought this fishing net and later I restored it with Silicon rubber sculpture
PREGNANT ROOM-2008
Solo Project at Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai.
This is my first solo project, in Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai, India. I was collecting potholes on roads since long, I use to take a mould of Pothole on the Roads, later I bought them together to fabricate a large mould and later they were casted and juxtaposed in white cube space. It is interactive artwork.
