BIO
VINITA KHANNA
My works deploy a language of visual force across disciplines, including sculpture, painting, installation, collage, poetry, and photography.
My long-standing interest in Eastern philosophy (namely Advaita Vedanta), cosmology, and the environment has led to a quasi gesamtkunstwerk practice in which the artwork is the result of deep meditation on the human relationship to all the three disciples. These themes in my work, are expressed using poetic language to describe how the body/mind experience relates to our immediate environment and the wider cosmos.
My research has led me to collaborate with scientists and environmentalists. More so in the past six years when I developed several installations works often including an interactive process, conveying the urgency of the continuing environmental destruction.
The defective thought that has led societies and individuals globally to opt for more cramped spaces, stuff, concepts, images and images of stuff, is designed to exponential growth. Despite the mythology of 'more' becoming defunct, we are tied to the growth concept and a solution to all socio economic dilemma.
This enquiry tries to organise the ever-expanding inflation of images, information, and the material/stuff, through collage, drawing, and sometimes three-dimensional objects, bringing new meaning to the lack of coherence. The rearrangement of discarded materials proposes new alliances in which the object is no longer separate from the body but part of a larger continued space. A sort of viscous mesh in which the parts become bigger and as zoetic as the whole.
We may have mastered the superficial space of our immediate environment but remain oblivious to the intimacy of its complexities. The question continually being asked is of perceived reality and the meanings of its materiality and nature. I am concerned with the possibilities of where human perception and experience really transpire and how we can lay to rest many of the mythologies created by the political isms including the latest technologically led capitalist consumer society.
My own spiritual experiences from a very young age has given me a deep interest in human behaviour and I have worked for several years with young people with troubled minds. To some extent our consumer based society is designed to encourage a neurotic relationship in which we are in a constant state of dissatisfaction and distress in order to fulfil our part in the ideal created by consumer markets. .
Jung believed the idea of the Numinous experience as being the only way ultimately to cure any neurosis that has taken over the mind. “… a dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will…. The numinosum—whatever its cause may be—is an experience of the subject independent of his will…. The numinous is either a quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of consciousness….”
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Main / Solo Art Exhibitions
Delta Wharf Studios- Climate and Conflict- 2019
Somerset House- Kings College- Light Late 2019
Imperial College Festival May 2018
Greenovate Festival October 2018
Natural History Museum 2016- Colour and Vision
Tate Modern, London 2015 -Light & Dark Matters
Natural History, Museum 2015 -Science Uncovered
Science Museum, London, 2015
Royal Society London, 2015- International Year of Light
Gallery Escape, New Delhi, 2013
Oriental Art Fair, Piccadilly, London 2010
Air Gallery London 2009
Palace Wharf Studios 2008
Art@42 gallery London 2006 ( Solo)
Indar Pasricha Gallery London 2006 (Solo)
Tehelka, Asia House London 2006
Norwich Gallery, Norwich, East 2005
Branchville Gallery Connecticut, 2004
Klink and Bank Art Space, Iceland, 2004
Victoria & Albert Museum, London -Affordable Housing 2004
The Millennium Gallery, London, September 2003
Message to India, British Council, Delhi, Bombay, Jaipur 2002
Exhibition, Mare Street Studios, London, 2001
Lift Gallery London, 2000 ( Solo)
Goldsmith's MA final, London, 1999
Centre Point Gallery, London, 1999
Angel Spaces, London, 1989
Touring Exhibition Ikon Gallery, UK, 1989-1990
Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 1989
Gallery at the United Nations, Geneva, 1987
Gallery Chausse Coqs, Geneva, 1987
Maison Fiasco, Geneva, 1986
Centre D’art Contemporain, Geneva, 1986
Sri Nakhariwirot University, (Solo), Bangkok, 1981