SOLO EXHIBITION
Kathiwadi House, Mumbai, India.
The Sacred and The Profane
The show is a selection of multiple works exploring the process of devotion, religiosity and veneration. It focuses on the experience of the sacred, and more precisely on the creative force that is characteristic of religions which has a divine essence and leads to a specific cult. One has multiple ways to experience sacredness such as through rituals or through the vision or the contact with a sacred object.
Ranging from collages on paper, sculptures to mises-en-scène of ritual elements, all the works are achieved with thread and bead work. Collection of found objects, they intrinsically have a symbolic charge that makes them precious, if not sacred.
This exhibition examines the blurred boundaries between sacredness and the commonplace. Each element of a work, either an old photograph, a postcard, or a ritual item from the domestic sphere, individually gives access to the past, raising questions about its own secrecy and mystery. Similarly, each photograph repeatedly shows a cast of actors and actresses wearing new costumes and accessories as part of a new plot.
Enhancing the characters, the halo is the mystic light that surrounds also the feminine figures, evocations of the begums, women of the harem, who are present like astral and allegorical representations.
Works on display are a syncretism which reveals a hybrid mythology, symbolism or ritual. The language of the bygone cohabits with the modernity, the East with the West, the sacred with the profane. Influenced both by French and Indian aesthetics, Geoffrey Planque’s artistic research has recurring themes like memento mori, inherited from Baroque movement and Christian Art in Europe, or the Indo-Mughal aesthetics.
Through The Sacred and the Profane, Geoffrey Planque wants to share experiences of the senses that are the core of the experience of the sacred. It only demands a moment of contemplation to get the « essence » (ras) of the play.