Amitava Das | Arunkumar HG| Ashim Purkayastha | Bharti Kher |C. Douglas | Debanjan Roy | GR Iranna| Gigi Scaria | Gogi Saroj Pal | Himmat Shah | Jagannath Panda | Jamini Roy | Jayashree Chakravarty | Jitish Kallat | Jyoti Bhatt | Kalighat Paintings | KG Subramanyan |KM Madhusudhanan| Karen Knorr | Leela Mukherjee | LN Tallur | Madhvi Parekh | Manisha Gera Baswani | Manjit Bawa | Manjunath Kamath | MF Husain | Mithu Sen | Prabhakar Pachpute | PS Ladi | Rabindranath Tagore| Ram Rahman | Ranbir Kaleka | Raqib Shaw| Rina Banerjee | Shibu Natesan| Sonia Khurana | Suhasini Kejriwal | Surendran Nair | Tapas Sarkar| Vasudevan Akkitham

SIGHTINGS: out of the wild, presents a selection of over one hundred and fifty artworks of forty artists from the collection of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and other collections.

Out of place, a startled (living) cheetah within a palatial interior presents conflicting narratives. Is this a forced migration, loss of natural habitat or an accidental detour? A ‘rinky-dinky’ panther in its flamboyant pink body covered with sperm-shaped bindis is ready to leap at its prey or take off to seek life elsewhere. An elephant made of burnt wood excretes silver poop in an unusual case of esophageal reflux. The rhinoceros made out of reclaimed industrial packaging wood burnt and recycled paper pulp is trying to make its way into the room. It is already half-way there. Animals bring back to memory the stuff of childhood, the beauty of their form and texture, their capability to connect and respond to love and care and the desire to draw and shape them in material.

‘Creatures of the mind and less of this world’ frolic and lurk in the dark interiors of the subconscious. A conference of birds and beasts takes place against a semi-apocalyptic, cloudy and smoke-filled sky, derelict cityscape and a facade of an ancestral house, perhaps for arduous journeys yet to be undertaken. And, there we see the cockroach, magnified and beautifully detailed, precariously occupying the edge where sanitized floor and designed buildings confront the sensual lush of nature. The homeless sparrows flutter around a barren tree, while humans occupy the expanding cityscape with more skyscrapers and apartment homes. The endangered butterflies all seek refuge in a cocoon-form, a hide away place, far from the fear of humans. A hybrid, previously non-existent creature, snarls out from depleting agrarian economy of Rajasthan. The winged creatures in the absence of god, cast a spell of doubt amidst all glitters and the column of ants relentlessly move within the anatomy of a house, drawing lines and patterns routing cracks and corners.

‘Sightings: out of the wild’ highlights an existential void and our increasingly uneasy relationship with the natural/animal world- a splintered world that seeks renewal, contact and oneness with nature. It presents fables and allegories of the animal world that appear in human-centric tales and imagination; told and reflected through playful and critical contestations staged between human and other species.

The exhibition hints at the fissures, the trauma of encroachment, human neglect, signs of extinction, resistance and the reverse gaze of the other living worlds.