When plant is metaphor for life

This one for the art lovers! Exhibit 320, Lado Sarai is hosting The Secret Life of Plants, curated by Maya Kóvskaya and featuring artists from India, China, and Iran, including Ravi Agarwal, Sonia Mehra Chawla, Neha Choksi, Anita Dube, Han Bing, GR Iranna, Sathyanand Mohan, Muktinath Mondal, Parvathi Nayar, Neda Razavipour, Shine Shivan, Sumakshi Singh and Hema Upadhyay.

The preview for the show will run till September 30th where art lovers can see the unique concept of the artistes.

The Secret Life of Plants draws its inspiration from a verse by Pablo Neruda in which plants are taken as metaphorical messengers carrying the ‘hidden flowers’ of profound human emotions.

Through a dialogue among a diverse body of works that span the disciplines of painting, photography, performance art, sculpture, video installation and mixed media approaches, the show explores the way in which the natural world comes to be invested with profound personal, social and cultural significance.

One of the artistes Sonia Mehra Chawla who is exhibiting her piece of art called The Core explained the concept of the exhibition, “We have taken plant as the metaphor for the exhibition. In my artwork the female body is symbolised through the growth process of a plant and other life forms. I have also portrayed the birth of a human till his last stage of life, i.e. death.”

The works in the exhibition explore The Secret Life of Plants from a variety of perspectives: from desire and sexuality, to sources of life nurturing sustenance such as food and oxygen; from objects of labour and cultivation to biological and reproductive life systems, to symbols of knowle­dge of good and evil; from reflections of socially constructed notions of urbanised, and spaces of silence and solitude, plants speak a secret language that unfolds in a temporality different form and tells us as much about ourselves in relation to our world and the ways we make sense of our own lives and the human condition as it does about the playful surface subject.

Another artiste displayed his artwork based on urbanisation and globalisation. “My piece of art explains how the youth is thinking about urbanisation, globalisation and how the nature is getting hampered due to that,” said GP Iranna.