VIKRAM DIVECHA Beirut-born, Mumbai-bred, Vikram Divecha works between New York and Dubai. His conceptual practice has developed around what he calls 'found processes’. By realigning socioeconomic relationships Divecha creates affective situations that raise questions about ethics and value. He generates site-specific projects, public art, collaborative works, video, photography and drawings. Exhibitions include Living Room: UIT (Use it together), ISCP, New York (2019); Co-Lab, Louvre Abu Dhabi, UAE (2017), Rock, Paper, Scissors: Positions in Play, National Pavilion UAE, 57th Venice Biennale, Venice (2017); Tamawuj, Sharjah Biennial 13, Sharjah (2017); Minor Work, Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai (2017).
For his thesis exhibition Divecha presents ‘Gallery 354’ (2019), a project that reflects upon the namesake gallery within the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s southwest wing. Taking the subdued lighting at Gallery 354 as a departure point, this project meditates on light, retina and perception to create shifting subjective positions—the objects on display, the museum, and the artist, become actors in its narrative thread. Formally playing with light and darkness, questions on presence & absence, image making apparatus & spirit nature become evident. Photography becomes a medium, metaphor and material to complicate our understanding of time and space. While representation and capture is the notion generally associated with photography, an elusive nature is posited through a series
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of aesthetic gestures, raising questions about agency and effect of the Melanesian objects on display. The sparse but immersive installations explore the materiality of darkness, positing the darkroom as a space for imagination. Sight, sound and smell engage the viewer, while the lyric essay format is employed to stitch a series of encounters at Gallery 354. There are repeated but futile attempts to seek the spiritual, which are possibly thwarted as they are conducted through the shortcomings of a modern lens.
