RL Fine Arts are happy to present, in association with Gallery Espace of New Delhi, the first New York solo show of exciting young artist, Birendra Pani. Mr. Pani is originally from Odisha, India, and his themes are very much occupied with traditions of his native state, and it’s position to a increasingly global India and an increasingly global world.

Birendra Pani’s present exhibition “Re-Vision” is a continuation of his engagement with the once popular and now endangered traditional dance form called Gotipua dance and the past cultural tradition of Odisha in a broader sense. Gotipua dance form which is performed by the boys in the guise of girls, has its own language, rhetoric and symbols and a living experience through the fabric of social life. Odisha has a rich legacy of diverse visual culture and sensibility with vast history of stone carving and monumental feeling which have been neglected and abandoned now. The present series of work is the refraction of the fantasy of a nostalgic past, a landscape of memory with change in space and time. Cultural memory of past events and of originary narratives become enmeshed in the reconstructions of past and relating it with knowledge to a contemporary situation by criticism, appropriation, preservation and transformation. The exhibition is an invocation towards the phenomenology of a new vision of re-visiting and re-defining the interrelationships between cultural memory, identity and history in a situation of loss of and reinvention of “self” in a globalize and yet localized world. S. Hall’s assertion that culture and identity are irrevocably intertwined through memory. The intentionality of the artist is the creation of a personal iconography by negotiating with the contingent spheres of influences in the global-local conundrum and the cultural negligence of Odishan art by engaging with tradition in an innovative way.

Rajashree Biswal Art Historian , New Delhi