“The Other Side of Time”

Samanta Batra Mehta’s first solo exhibition in India opens on 18th April 2013 in Shrine Empire, New Delhi. Drawing inspiration from ‘Cabinets of Curiosities’, the oftentimes eccentric collections of objects in Renaissance Europe, Samanta Batra Mehta’s work in her exhibition, “The Other Side of Time”, broadly maps connections between the human condition and the environment we inhabit. An insatiable collector of antiquarian books, historical maps, prints and objects of interest, Batra Mehta has delved into her personal collections to depict themes in personal identity, gender constructs, social order and colonial history.

‘Cabinets of Curiosities’, also known as ‘Cabinets of Wonder’, were a collection of oddities which defied strict categorization but could be said to be specimens (or facsimiles) that belonged to the natural world, relics of religion, scientific instruments, human biology and archaeology, among others. Such collections were regarded to be a reflection of the collector/owner’s inner-psyche: a microcosm of thought, belief and interest.

In this body of work spanning photography, prints, drawings and installation, Batra Mehta journeys though her experiences in family history, childhood nostalgia, parenthood and, moving beyond the realm of the personal, towards themes in gender constructs, sociocultural order and post-colonial theory. As an artist Indian artist living in New York for the past decade- she obliquely alludes to issues of identity, dislocation and migration. Batra Mehta uses antiquarian objects and texts to re-purpose them and ascribe alternative meanings. Her visual vocabulary often has elements of the human form intertwined with that of nature. Nature/landscape is seen and a metaphor for the body (and vice-versa) and as a site for germination, nourishment, degradation, trespass, plunders colonization and transgression.

Download curatorial essay