As technology continues to progress at a great speed, it has had vast influences and effects on the lives of human beings. In the process, the concept of time and space has changed to a great extend especially in the last few years. 'Webotika: I am an Alien and this is my Spacecraft' is an attempt by artist Unnati Singh to portray this changing world and the personal and universal chaos it has set off, through her artworks.
“ It looks at contemporary life today and talks about several things from changes in culture, to geography, to geology,” says Singh, who was born in Rajasthan but now divides her time between Goa, Mumbai and Delhi. “It is not a protest, but rather a gaze or a probe into today's times. I want to make the viewer think and question things.”
The exhibition will consist of mixed media collage paintings and paper drawings as well as two large installations and her works see superheroes and emoticons co-existing with children book and lexicon cut outs of extinct reptiles and insects, organs and city scans, plants, planets and airplanes.
“ The exhibition is an eye opener and slightly experimental and the collage technique has been used in a different way. There are nine canvas paintings apart from paper drawings where she has used different mediums like inks, acrylic colours and crayons,” says Katharina Domscheit-D’souza, who has curated the exhibition. “It looks at how people perceive the world around them today and their own feelings and the use of language in the digital world.”
Elaborating on the quirky title for the show, D'Souza states that the word 'webotika' is a fusion of three words “ web, erotic and robotic. “ Her pictures deal not only with the impact of the world wide web but also with the web that connects us all and the chemical connections that we share with each other. At the same time the pictures are also erotic in nature to an extent. Also a lot of the imagery is futuristic, hence the inclusion of the word robotic,” explains D'Souza. “ Unnati also uses a lot of text in her works and the subheading of the title is taken directly from one of the paintings 'Void'. I think it summarises the whole show, in that she like many of us, at times feels disconnected from the world. So we make our own bubble and continue to evolve.”
