Important Notice

Jagannath Panda’s paintings speak of an uneasy urbanization, where the re-settlement or, more alarmingly, the ‘neo-colonization’ of land results in the alienation and disaffection of all its residents, human and animal. Using motifs that are, at best, surreally out of place, the artist comments on the easily ignored exploitation of animals, land and resources that results from urban sprawl, and that eventually affects us, the agents of this... Jagannath Panda’s paintings speak of an uneasy urbanization, where the re-settlement or, more alarmingly, the ‘neo-colonization’ of land results in the alienation and disaffection of all its residents, human and animal. Using motifs that are, at best, surreally out of place, the artist comments on the easily ignored exploitation of animals, land and resources that results from urban sprawl, and that eventually affects us, the agents of this development.

"With the palpable need for a ‘home’ for the migrant, antispatial, high rise gated communities replace miles of green fields. The past and the present are set up in appositional relationships, as a pocket of India demonstrates the neo-colonization of the rural hinterland. In the period of the personal as political identity, or the body as the site for art, Jagannath Panda gives us the seeming barren environs of a city as a subject of contemplation…But if the quantum representation of urbanism yields a visible spectacle, Panda chooses to evacuate these pleasures. The possibility of the spectacle has just arrived, or is not yet visible and the viewer is left in an uneasy limbo" (Gayatri Sinha, Recent Works by Jagannath Panda, Saffronart and Berkeley Square Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2006).

On first examining the present lot, viewers are startled by what seems to be a meteor-like grilled piece of meat hurtling downward with great speed through the clear blue sky. Shifting their focus to its destination, they find the factories of an industrial estate billowing out smoke, and their neighbouring grounds polluted beyond redemption by their sewage and effluents. The real shock, however, is delivered when viewers realize that the current residents of this ground, a herd of itinerant goats blithely feeding off its contamination, are very closely related to the grilled meat above them. Here, Panda effectively uses the ironic affiliation of scavenger with food to illuminate the pervasive consequences of urbanization that cannot be shut out of gated communities or kept off the table (quite literally, in this case) in our cities.

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