Thukral and Tagra
As a community, we all stand at the juncture of uncertainty trying to find new avenues through comfort and care by providing purpose to ourselves. The works, Conjecture, are a decade-long investigation into migration, the nature of ephemerality, social reality, and acts of survival. Expanding on their studio practice through the vocabulary for play, Thukral & Tagra's circumflex table-tennis structures are caught in a fragile act of resilience during times of vulnerability. The surface of the table attempts to support the weight of the limitless cosmos. The only silver lining to the self-drawn borders is living in the moment that forms into new ones.
The viewer's journey is precarious, as at any moment it threatens to slip or melt between the gaps of time and space. The ideas of aspirations and anxiety propel us to see the plausible future.
The spaces between the matter indicate fragmented nature and resultant instability of our morphing reality.
STUDIO PRACTICE: THROUGH THE VOCABULARY OF SPORTS
The British ruled the game of Table Tennis, invented as an indoor version of Lawn Tennis. A parlor game that became popular in the 18th Century, Table Tennis is still played in schools around the world and is also an Olympic sport.
Thukral and Tagra explore the idea of 'play' from a cultural, strategic, and psychological perspective with elements of the game appearing in their works since 2015 in various forms.
ABOUT THUKRAL and TAGRA
Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra work collaboratively with a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, installations, interactive games, video, performance and design. Thukral & Tagra work on new formats of public engagement and attempt to expand the scope of what art can do. They break out of the mediated and disciplinary world and create multi-modal sensory and immersive environments. Their earlier work dealt with tropes of migration and motifs of a globally manifested consumer culture. It questioned the provenance of Indian identity and its various articulations. Their recent work has dealt with the interpretation of Indian mythological narratives and symbols in ways that renew and enliven a largely pedantic and static area of cultural material.
From a pop visual character to a pre-dominantly abstract visual approach and compositional philosophy, Thukral & Tagra constantly shift in terms of their grammar and vocabulary. The abstract suggestions of an everyday experience of architecture and urban design in Gurgaon (Haryana, India) and Chandigarh (Punjab, India) is embedded in their visual language. They have offered sociopolitical commentary that is implicit in their aesthetic for the past fifteen years.
