Project Description

Metal Urn Series

This series of work is called URN Series, it is meant for the human bodies, so is meant to keep the ashes of the deceased body safe. This series of work recontextualizes and explores the relationship of functional objects with the human body. The surrealistic and unexpected appearance of the resulting forms grants each of the pieces a new manifestation through subjective perception of the objects.

These works are developed through joining the forms of human body with objects having socio-cultural significance, resulting in a visual language Interlinking ideas with the human body referring to joining of the two entanglements between nature and culture. Objects are selected by virtue of their physical and psychological material force, value and power (agency) to influence and govern human desires to the point of obsession to own them. The combination of forms reminiscent of muscles, flesh and texture of human skin being quite fragile in nature, rendered in metal like copper or glazed porcelain, is quite conflicting. It is powerful as well as ironic. The insertion of form of human body as reference to the subjects into objects and the elision of objects or functionality in the work, allow for looking beyond the ordinary appearance of corpus objects, an aspect which yields a complex exchange of ideas, imagery between the world of commodification and art, and between the world of practical usage and consumption. Material world and its contents are not fixed or stable entities, but are relational and uneven. They emerge in unpredictable around actions and events. In a chaotic network of habitual and non-habitual connections, always in flux, reassembling in different ways.

“For new materialists, human bodies and all other material, social and abstract entities have no ontological status or integrity other than that produced through their relationship to other similarly contingent and ephemeral bodies, things and ideas.” (Barad, 1996: 181; Braidotti, 2013: 3)

The works have been made in 2014-2015.