Pranay Dutta

Statement

My practice examines the complex relationship between our terrestrial species and landscapes; drawing from the tension between our exploitative, extractive processes, and the imaginations/fictions of care, mutation, survival, regeneration and ‘hope’. It departs from the spilling demands of our technological era that depend on further depleting the Earth’s natural resources and studies its vast implications on the future of our ecological systems. Deriving from scientific, infrastructural and climatic data and an archive of images created over the past 8 years, my practice employs the language/devices of science fiction and gaming worlds to coalesce geology, archaeology, physics, ecology and historical inquiry through nomadic pursuit and deep time. I strive to evoke a sense of crumbling. I invite viewers to become explorers or witnesses of unpredictable and isolating future microcosms. These are presented as immersive simulations where a collision between our collective futures, the past, and alternate versions of our own present occur. My attempt is to reveal or accentuate the invisible and visible forces that mould landscapes – these range from geological to climatic events, colonization and extraction of resources. In drawing and painting these data predicted worlds onto vinyl and in the software Blender, these familiar places are rendered unrecognizable. I am invested in projecting vulnerability, and the fractures between civilisation and nature. Geological and dimensional time along with water recur as catalysts of sudden and gradual physical transformations in my work.

B.V.A (2016) in Painting from M.S.U, Baroda.