Black Landscape

Curated by Priyasri Patodia, Black Landscapes is Alok Bal’s first solo exhibition where the artist turns the earth into self-testimony, it becomes a site where the past is buried under cement and the horizon is stitched with scaffolding. His vision draws from Jean-Pierre Criqui’s reflections on Jean-Marc Bustamante’s photographs: “Most of the pictures contain no human figure. But traces of humanity are everywhere… roads, planted fields, telephone poles, shelters… houses (sometimes under construction, their materials displayed like letters in some invasive alphabet)… these are edges, borders, zones of demarcation.”

For Bal, subjects emerge from personal interests such as wildlife, football, and fleeting images from daily life. These shifts may perplex those following his oeuvre, but for Alok, who prefers to be a wanderer, they are natural. His recent focus on devastated landscapes stems from years of living in Baroda, where the city has expanded beyond its earlier periphery. The undulating terrain once visible has transformed into construction sites.

Irony flickers through his works as Bal interrogates urbanization and its icons that are the roots of devastation. We see this through his paintings of Hanuman holding a concrete replica of the life-giving mountain, or a cow with a cement udder elevated on a pedestal. Through these he highlights the erasure of nature, tradition, memory and life due to development. These paintings hold the paradox of displacement, they yearn for life and yet remain locked in the urban desire. And hence, for him our land is no longer the same, it has transformed into what he calls “synthetic landscape”, a clear indication to the effects of urbanisation.

The title Black Landscapes is deliberate as the series reflects Alok’s awareness of the term’s subversive implications, offering a layered critique of development, memory, and the irreversible transformation of land.