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Born
in Kerala in 1956, Baiju Parthan is a cutting edge artist who lives and
works in Bombay. He has done his BSC in Botany, studied painting from
1978-83 at the art school in Goa and he has a Master’s degree in
Comparative Mythology at Bombay University. In 1995, Parthan began studying
computers, learning hardware engineering, building his own machines and
creating programmes. Parthan began
to study the Indian mystical arts, exploring tantra, ritual arts, and Indian
mythology. Simultaneously, Western art continued to exert an influence. Baiju
Parthan’s art practice revolves around information technology and its
impact on perception and meaning generation. His art explores how
information streams alter our perception of reality and how new categories
of experience clubbed under the generic term 'virtual' reshape our cherished
ideas about the world. Technology in his work is primarily used as an
interactive space’, where each node is a choice that branches out into an
exploration of fluid boundaries of meaning, that suggests the ever present
local within the global, and the human cogency.
The mediums of his works are a commingling of his training in various
fields. He at one makes paintings, digital images, installations, as well as
translits or backlit display boxes.
He
makes sophisticated play with the seductive images & slogan – wisdom
of advertising & the media & at the same time he incorporates
elements from popular religious iconography in his dream constructs, as he
sometimes describes his artworks. Personally, he lives in a post-colonial concept of space where the
world exists as a flux. Entering the domain of Baiju Parthan’s
images is rather like entering a computer game, an experience of revelry in
which you are dazzled by mysterious symbols, set afloat on a stream of cross
references, stonewalled by coded instructions and rescued by escape routes
that open up without warning.
In
this regime of metamorphosis, forms change constantly, but certain
hereditary patterns retain their force: garnering their energy from a
polyphonic simultaneity of ancient and contemporary mythologies. He is
entirely in synchrony with the underground history of out age, which is
being shaped by dissident global movements of pacific anarchism,
environmental awareness and spiritual regeneration in the catacombs and
cathedrals of the Net. Parthan’s images attest to the swirling and chaotic
ancestries we carry within us and they are a riddling collage of images and
text that appeals to the sensuous apprehension even as it stimulates the
intellect.
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© 2002 The Guild. All rights
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