KAUTUHALSHALA - कौतूहलशाला
Kautuhalshala (Sanskrit) means “A Place for Collective Discourse of Inquisitive Minds”
This series of works is an effort to respond to the various situations and the surroundings tracing its conflicts and the absurdities in which we are living. As basic necessities of life , we human beings orient ourselves towards opportunities - opportunities of growth, achievements and self actualisation. That is the light we seek but this light too, has to be adequate. If too less, we grope in darkness and if too bright, we become blind and disoriented.
For Abhishek Narayan Verma, Kautuhalshala is an attempt to create a place where he tries to serve his artistic creativity while allowing himself to raise various questions and play about the struggles and mistakes of daily lives more often as a solo play. He fuels his imagination by colliding facts and experiences, injecting them into his artistic process, which also helps him to debase his own understanding and perception in order to reveal new insights.
This series was inspired by different myths as well as the artist’s own experiences. It takes references from well known proverbs and is highly self reflecting and demonstrates a creative approach to internal conflict resolution.
This series of works are inspired by the artist's stay in Vienna (Nov 2020-March 2021) and experiencing the whole winter season, experiencing snowfall for the first time and being overwhelmed by its magic and how it transforms a familiar landscapes into an unfamiliar/forbidden/magical wonderland and also slows down the pace of the world and certain wrapped up silence to fall.
This series was created during the early lockdown days in 2020, which was enforced due to the pandemic. As a response to that situation everyone was trying to find a solution or balance for mental peace and various support systems while also being distant from their friends, families and other relationshpis and hopeful for better days to arrive soon.
In this series, the artist responded to the present times, our desires and beliefs, the search for precision as a lifestyle and the flawless adaptation capacity while living in this contemporary culture.
In our daily life, we aim to succeed in everything we do and wish our plans work out the way we intended. But we cannot have it all, so our lives are an accumulation of compromises. Abhishek Narayan Verma created a kind of game in which he combined aspects of different scenarios to form new thought provoking stories.
Burning candles have a long history, with different meanings and applications, from an act of spirituality to a tool of protest. In this series, the artits explores new contexts in which candles can be displayed, breaking with traditional approaches.
The artist’s diaries display parts of his daily life, offering inspiration for his final artworks. They are a safe space where he spends time with himself jotting, drawing, writing poems in vernacular language as well as thinking about and documenting every small situation and everyday condition.
