OF DIVINE LOSS

Shaurya Kumar explores the relationship between the subject and object of devotion, finds Aranya.

- Aranya

Shaurya Kumar’s There Is No God In The Temple comes at a time when the country’s relationship with the ‘sacred’ is charged with the immediacy and violence of public emotions. His work is concerned primarily with the politics of the artefact. Conceptual arcs of erosion, memory and reappropriation of divine meaning in an evolving game of material presence and absence, form the contours of the various works delicately rendered in a variety of mediums. The show was held at Gallery Threshold from the 1st of November, 2022, to the 15th of February, 2023.

“What happens to a devotee when the idol, the divine, is looted and the temple is left in ruination?” Kumar asks. This question of loss is brought to the fore through a fractured aesthetic that reanimates the relationship between the subject and object of devotion. Kumar is interested in the distortion and evolution of that which was once godly. The fact that approximately 50,000 idols and artefacts have been smuggled out of India between 1947 and 1989 (according to an UNESCO estimate) forms the backdrop of his engagement with forgotten shrines and crumbling havens of worship. The title references a well-known Rabindranath Tagore poem,