THE FRACTURED PROSPECT

Nocturnal landscapes as ruins in the making? Adwait Singh looks at Biraaj Dodiya's scenes of loss.

- Adwait Singh

Have you ever stayed at the beach beyond the sunset to witness the water congeal into opaqueness, its depths yielding nothing save lurking fears of the unknown? The spectacular scenery from a moment ago, suddenly closes in and turns unfamiliar, sinister even. The waves dare you on like a siren’s song, alarmingly, alluringly. It takes a special, unnatural effort of will to ponder the sublime without succumbing to it. Biraaj Dodiya’s nocturnal landscapes appear heavy with similar ponderings, compelling one to tie oneself to the mast and stare into the eye of the storm.

Born and raised in Mumbai by parents who are themselves celebrated artists, Dodiya holds an MFA from NYU (2018) and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2015). She has had two major solo exhibitions at Experimenter till date, Stone is a Forehead in 2020 (from the 10th of November to the 23rd of December) and Every Bone a Song in 2022. Her first show Burn your finger, And kiss it yourself was at 80WSE, New York, in 2017. Dodiya’s works can be broadly classified into paintings and mixed media assemblages, usually in some kind of correspondence with each other. Her early paintings displayed a preoccupation with twilit landscapes on the verge of losing their form, focus and familiarity. Capturing these in this liminal light, caught in the moment of transformation, became a way for her to open them up for imaginative extrapolations as evidenced by their titles.

Conscious of the recent political attempts at re-coding our built landscapes, Dodiya holds that the notion of territory inheres within every landscape. This is certainly bolstered by theories surrounding landscapes that underscore their embroilment with colonial and capitalist power structures. For instance, W.J.T. Mitchell in his book Landscape and Power proposes that