Birender Kumar Yadav's Slow Dancing in a Burning Room
1X1 Art Gallery is pleased to present 'Birender Kumar Yadav: Slow Dancing in a Burning Room. This exhibition offers the viewer a space to introspect deeply on a humanistic level.
'It's not our problem. It's a poor people problem. It's a class problem. It's a race problem. It's a gender problem. It's their problem. It's not our problem.'
Social egotism often numbs us, desensitizing us to greater existential threats that jeopardize our very human core. Inherent cognitive mechanisms based on social egotism disables us, making us incapable of seeing beyond our immediate interests, wherein our reactions, most of the time, emerge from national, cultural, societal, and/or personal conditioning and reinforcement.
This exhibition poses the question of identity within the modern social context, the question of representation and politics of class difference, the issue and plights of the working class society, and the nature of violence that is prevalent in our society; widely prevalent, often noticed, yet predominantly overlooked. The artworks expose the irony of modern structures and systems that conveniently forget the hands that built them. Leaving the working class to fester in appalling conditions, we continue to 'coexist', unperturbed; perhaps without the cognizance of the invaluable societal fraction.
Yadav's works are a collective reminder that brings together popular historical narratives that trace the roots of gunpowder back to the mid-9th century, where a group of alchemists in an attempt to create a medicine for immortality, had accidentally burned down the house by creating the ‘black powder’ instead.
Explosive Heart, 2020
Yadav's commentary on the exaggerated political metaphors of power-lust and nationalist fervor is aided by the use of gunpowder as a medium in his artistic oeuvre. His works satirize the perceived malleability of the working-class lives that are assisted by convenient puppetry and politicized jumle (promises).
Material Matters, 2020
The juxtaposition of popular imagery on peace and patriotism with the matches underline activist tropes in Yadav's works, which with the slightest of friction can result in a fire (or backfire).
Striking Surface 1, 2017
Furthermore, Birender renders drawings of tools used by labourers to signify the impossibility of separating the two, labourers and tools. The materiality of these labourious instruments becomes synonymous with those that use them, with those defined by them, with those who become them.
Barricade, 2021
Yadav's Slow Dancing in a Burning Room sets a reminder that we can only fix this world together, undivided.
Light of India, 2020
