HAVE I EVER OPPOSED YOU? NEW ART FROM INDIA AND PAKISTAN
18 March – 22 May 2010
Kanishka Raja (b.1970, India)
Cruise (Green Stripes) 2008, Oil on canvas, 152 x 213 cm
Kanishka Raja creates complex psychological interiors. Anonymous airport lounges present a world void of inhabitants, yet they are suffused with mysterious signs of human occupation such as tents and army cots, the occasional Play-station or flat screen TV. It has always been a fundamental aspect of the artist’s work to explore the collision between traditions of Western perspective and the particular conventions of pictorial design in Indian miniature painting. Raja takes his cues from the pre-Renaissance idea of rendering space by collapsing and compressing perspective, an idea which is also explored in videogames, while the iconography of the airport continues to operate as the quintessential liminal space: the place of arrival and departure.
Kanishka Raja was born in Calcutta and lives in New York. He received the ICA/Digitas Artist Prize of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 2004, and has had solo exhibitions at the Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, Envoy, New York, the Allston Skirt Gallery, Boston and Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai. He was recently included in group shows at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, the Contemporary Art Center, Virginia Beach, VA, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA and the New York Center for Arts + Media Studies, New York. Raja has an upcoming solo exhibition at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York, in November 2010.