The contemporary art world is good at retrospect. Once an artist has arrived, the early work acquires a logic that may not have existed at the time. The experiments become foreshadowing. The hesitations become part of a method. Fresh Produce, Method’s recurring exhibition of early-stage artistic practices, is interested in an earlier and more unstable moment, before the work has been neatly arranged into a career narrative.
For its third edition, Method selected 16 artists from more than 400 portfolios submitted through an open call. The exhibition includes Angel-Rose Oedit Doebé, Arun Sharma, Billu Samosa, Jhalak Garg, Mehta Varun, Mohd. Arif, Mrinal Das, Paarijat Chakraborty, Pratik Khurkutiya, Prithwin Dutta, Riddhi Mahaldar, S Rakhi Mehta, Sakshee Patel, Shobhit Chaturvedi, Sourabh Chhawry and Yogi Rajput.
The jury, comprising Feroze Gujral, Akansha Rastogi and Sahil Arora, did not look for a shared aesthetic or subject. “There was an overwhelming number of strong suggestions,” Arora says. What emerged from the deliberations was an interest in “authentic, early-stage practices that showed potential for strong growth and development and are currently underexposed in the art market.”
That distinction matters. Potential can be difficult to exhibit. It may appear as confidence in one artist and uncertainty in another. It may live in technical ambition, an unresolved idea or a visual language still finding its grammar. Arora says each submission was evaluated “on its own independent merit,” leaving the exhibition without the curatorial thesis that might otherwise explain how its works belong together.
The result, according to Jhalak Garg, feels less like a single conversation than several taking place at once. Moving through the exhibition, she says, is “almost like walking through a garden with completely different species growing next to each other.” The encounter has sharpened her understanding of her own practice, “The other works became a mirror for my own practice.”
For S Rakhi Mehta, the arrangement is “liberating yet precarious”. Without a theme instructing viewers where to locate meaning, “each work stands entirely on its own”. That vulnerability extends to interpretation. “When audiences project their own narratives,” she says, “they often predict the next phase of the practice before I’ve even figured it out myself.”
That may be the particular pleasure of Fresh Produce. The exhibition catches artists before certainty becomes part of the job, when a practice can still surprise its maker and a viewer’s misunderstanding might turn out to be an opening rather than a mistake.
When: August 21 to October 3 | 12 PM to 7 PM | Every day except Mondays
Where: Method, Delhi D-59, Basement, Defence Colony.
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