Matter features a series of images in a variety of formats that blend studio, street, landscape and portrait photography into a portrait of the “new” India, an ancient culture slamming up against contemporary realities. The site of rapid change brought on by globalization and breakneck development, India is searching for its identity – trying on new ones, uneasily inhabiting traditional ones, and shedding old ones like masks. Sikka’s images explore this mercurial identity from his own very personal perspective: urban, educated, middle-class and self-conscious. The palette of Matter is doggedly reductive; eschewing India’s clichéd bright hues, Sikka works only in blacks, greys, whites and silvers.
Bharat Sikka, born in 1973, completed a BFA at Parson’s School of Design in New York In 2002.
The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India
Until January 29, 2012
YBCA Galleries
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission Street (at 3rd Street)
San Francisco, CA 94103-3138
Julian Meijer Agency
7 Rue Pasquier
Paris 75008
Tel +33 1 4274 3035
