Are machines and installations purely technological and kinetic or they have creative instincts in them? Shailesh B.R.’s ongoing solo exhibition at the Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi expands his realm of work and showcases installations as his artistic muse. Named, The Sky in the Palm, it is curated by Mario-D’Souza and highlights his mechanical practice and how it blends so beautifully with art.
After having exhibited at the Daejeon Museum of Art, South Korea; Colomboscope, Sri Lanka and Abu Dhabi; and the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa; Shailesh returns to New Delhi with seven kinetic installations. These are accompanied by works on paper and notes which help in filling the gap between the display and its understanding. These notes help one understand the artist’s mind more closely through either actualized facts or invented reality.
Curator Mario D’ Souza, through the introductory exhibition essay states, “Across Shailesh B.R.’s practice, the sacred and the speculative converge in acts of questioning. His machines, myths, and metaphors do not offer certainty but open thresholds between the human and the more than human; the ancient and the algorithmic. Shailesh recalibrates the inherited as critical sites of reflection on belief, agency, and survival in this age of extreme exhaustion. Thinking, like faith, is not a closed circuit but a constant, alive process of attunement.”
Keeping up with the developing world, his works focus on the more-human kind through a subjective lens. He uses artificial intelligence as a focus point of starting a dialogue where it becomes the basis of interpreting and understanding the questions of self, knowledge gaps, and needful reality in documentation. The works on paper, on the other hand are inspired by artists Benodebehari Mukherjee, Henri Matisse and Man Ray; making Shailesh break medium and forms and piece all of them together to state his narrative.
What: The Sky in the Palm
Where: Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi
When: 10 am – 6 pm (Sundays closed)
On till December 3, 2025
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