Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran
Of Dreaming and Remembering
Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai

The title of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran’s most recent show, “Of Dreaming and Remembering,” alluded more to shifting states of consciousness than to a stasis of resolution. His largest project to date in India was, in his own words, an act of “material performativity” where clay and bronze masqueraded as other substances, new works performed antiquity, and the artist himself was engaged in a bodily practice of making that was both instinctive and cerebral. 

Here, the Colombo-born artist feverishly embedded the suggestive talismanic power of his hallucinogenic figures within a wholistic shrine of making, specifically creating what he called a “faux-studio mise en scène,” which relocated the processes and energies of his Sydney studio into the refined space of Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai. Nithiyendran’s committed investigation of secular and sacred idolatry was intensified in the gallery space, which overlooks the historically potent Gateway of India, the imposing arch monument to the British Crown and its fraught colonialist legacy. Plastic milk crates, long-emptied paint buckets, and high-density polyethylene barrels were stacked as precarious plinths for sculpted forms in bronze, patina, earthenware, stoneware, and glaze, while riotously hued builder’s plastic lined walls to form substrates for rapidly painted graffiti-like figures at scale. One plinth was adorned with a carousel of hastily cut printed images depicting devotional sculptures, masks, and wall paintings scooped from museum archives and funneled through internet searches until they found resonance with Nithiyendran’s hungrily searching eye.