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Lot 88

 

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Living and working in Mumbai, Justin Ponmany’s body of work may be located in the very urban intersections of personal and industrial, stasis and dynamism, both in terms of its material and its content. As Ranjit Hoskote explains, “In fashioning himself as a citizen and artist in a demanding, even inflammable metropolitan context, he seeks out implements that a robustly industrial-grade or pungently artisanal. His relatively unorthodox materials... Living and working in Mumbai, Justin Ponmany’s body of work may be located in the very urban intersections of personal and industrial, stasis and dynamism, both in terms of its material and its content. As Ranjit Hoskote explains, “In fashioning himself as a citizen and artist in a demanding, even inflammable metropolitan context, he seeks out implements that a robustly industrial-grade or pungently artisanal. His relatively unorthodox materials include resin, epoxy, hologram foil and printing ink; the photographs that he takes of people and sites as he walks or drives around Bombay serve him as working drawings. His aesthetic combines the grittiness of everyday technologies of communication and protocols of iteration with the lyricism of a meditation on self, place, time, decay and survival” (A Compass with Ten Directions, The Artist Lives and Works in Baroda / Bombay / Calcutta / Mysore / Rotterdam / Trivandrum, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinrucke exhibition catalogue, 2005, unpaginated).

“The city the Ponmany evokes, with its salt pans and abandoned textile mills, pylons and sagging power lines, is a lifeworld that sustains the improvisation of various identities…Through his riddling combinations of silvery hologram foil and rich pigment, his allusions to an archive of memory now available only in misted, blurred snapshots, Ponmany recalls us to the paradox of the postmodern moment: to the fact that individual experience today is profoundly intimate and unsharable, and yet can be publicly broadcast to anonymous auditors and viewers, through an email list, a blog, or a billboard” (Ibid.).

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