GALLERYSKE is Delighted to Present Sudarshan Shetty's One Life Many, a Collection of New Works

The India premiere of the eponymous film by Sudarshan Shetty is being hosted at One Life Many. A series of assemblages exhibited in conjunction with the film encourages viewers to contemplate the boundaries that unite and diverge the tangible and conceptual in their daily lives.

In South Asia, a well-known fable concerning the metamorphosis of the ego is portrayed in the film in various variations. Before returning, one version of the story describes a sage who undergoes a series of transformations, becoming a woman, a wife, and a mother.

This narrative is set in a contemporary world that is reawakening from a period of profound seclusion and self-reflection, as described in One Life Many. During this exceptional and universally observed instance, the turmoil and changes of individuals mirrored the world.

The artist's contemplation of the protagonist's awakening in various worlds and the possibility of multiple selves within one raises inquiries regarding memory, return, transformation, and the function of narrative in this process.

A theatre of quotidian life is produced through the juxtaposition of cinema and tangible forms of media, particularly through the recasting of commonplace objects that are part of our media ecologies (telephones, typewriters, projectors, and even mundane household items like teacups).

Through a series of unexpectedly assembled object bodies, One Life Many interrogates the quintessential spaces of contemporary memory formation and experience theatre, museum, and film providing portals through which we are able to scrutinise the tangible and the intangible, as well as the function of objects as evidence or appendages to the self. 

By connecting cinema, theatre, and the museum, the exhibition heightens our perception of indeterminate selves in ambiguous states of being and worlding by establishing a unique space between the real, surreal, and hyperreal. The artist employs an indirect strategy in a troubled and tumultuous world where identity is a crucial political asset.

One Life Many examines the interconnectedness of personal and global experiences, without exaggerating the uniqueness of individual experiences or reducing them to meaningless universals. The artist finds great inspiration in the resonant words of the renowned Indian musician Pandit Kumar Gandharva, who stated,

"We are individually multiple."

Exhibition Notes by Vyjayanthi Rao, Co-Editor-in-Chief, Public Culture (Duke University Press) and Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture.

Daily hours: 10 am to 7 pm January 6th through the 17th, 2024

Location: IF.BE, Mumbai

• Sudarshan Shetty's Instagram account is sudarshanstudio (https://www.instagram.com).