MA Final Show Experience

                               

One of those things that make you feel proud and contented!
After an absolutely intense year and an even more vehement couple of weeks finalizing and installing the main work for the degree show, my mind felt empty and spent for a long time after that.
It was a big adventure; not just working with multidimensionality in a single work and trying to combine two mediums (performance and Visual art), but doing it in such a way that it did not seem forced and could justify the concept I was wanting to express.

MID LIGHT, A mixed media installation of found objects, Sculptures, Drawings, and Videos, was inspired by the contrast of eternity in the creation (Orlando novel) and the mortality of the creator (Virginia Woolf's suicide). Not intended to be just an illustration of the novel or Virginia Woolf's personality/character, I dissolved it enough to allow my own interpretation to be visible as well, and the whole installation became more of a shrine to the idea of 'time' and its various dimensions - physical time, artistic time, and soul time. I worked to transform the whole room to a space of a different dimension and played with lighting as well. It took days of arranging and rearranging and shifting spaces to evolve a language that I could relate to, but it all came together in the end after a feverish process.
It was great to watch the audience reaction; the best part about leaving your work translucent is that each viewer brings in his own interpretation to it in the sense that it is not just a reaction to the visuals and the aesthetics, but a response to the core idea as well. It is beautiful to learn of all those hidden layers you never knew were in your work as they unfold through others' perceptions
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Below are a few pictures of the installation, and the feedback from my MA tutors, the feedback I was most nervous and eager to receive.
Thank you to everyone who helped/supported me and came by for the show! It is one amazing year and an experience I shall always cherish.

"Radhika has created a large scale configuration of images and objects that previously included drawings of communities on small floating islands it seemed, they ascended further up the picture plain and the viewer wondered about their migrating status. The drawing appeared transitive, fragile and intimate and it re-enforced the use of the readymade objects that support the rational of a foreign narrative. It is important for Radhika that the context for this world to exist is under a type of social experimentation, alongside the inclusion of poetry and text. Her critical research paper supports these aspects very well. The success of the work can only be demonstrated in the fluctuating motifs of display, which are further challenged by a sensitivity that is reworked further into her research paper. Well done. 

Your exhibition was competently installed and showed strong evidence of personal and professional development. The placement of performance-based video works with drawings, domestic objects and sculptural constructions transformed the exhibition space into a penumbral and rather spectral environment; your installation as a whole conjured the subjective and emotive aspects of interior space and hinted at personal and psychological narratives.

The disparate media deployed could have been integrated more effectively. More evidence of criticality and contextualisation could also have been provided. However, you are evidently developing a highly original spatial and performative language, and you should be congratulated on this. "