Cultural dialogue has been an integral part of Opera Gallery’s ethos since our inception 21 years ago.

We are delighted to launch our Paris exhibition program with From Day to Day, the first solo show in France for the illustrious Indian artist Valay Shende, who will be exhibiting twenty new sculptures and installations...

Valay Shende is 35 and is based in Bombay. His personal journey has been remarkable in both India, where one of his sculptures was awarded the ‘‘best sculpture in India’’ prize in 2002, and abroad through exhibitions in the United States, Switzerland and the UK, including at the Tate Modern in 2006.

As the second most populous nation on earth, with 1.25 billion inhabitants in 2013, India - an emerging scene of artistic creation - is torn between modernization and a profound need to retain its ancestral traditions. This tension is what inspires Shende’s sculptures and installations.

A keen observer of his own society and its upheavals, Shende creates his own symbolically charged materials (stainless steel, the key raw material of Indian daily life, photos of anonymous faces, the chakra/circle), which he assembles meticulously in order to draw us into his questioning about developments related to globalization.

But Valay Shende’s work is not merely anecdotal in nature - he also manages to pull us into his playground with humour and intelligence. His sculptures, rooted in his national culture but open to globalization, emphasize how fragile exponential economic growth can be.

Images belong to time - the present we are in will eventually become the past, and our futures will become the present and go on to become the past. In this manner, our pasts and histories are the result of our current situations and life. The future will reciprocally be affected by our system of current situations. We are all ephemeral, but what we leave behind and the manner in which we do so, will surpass us in time - through our works – for future generations.

In a fast paced contemporary world, we barely have the time to dedicate attention to absorption of facts and comprehension of memories. Valay Shende through his works unravels the pace of time, histories and myths to question where we as a society are placed today and the future of where we are headed. The human being and his system of society are the central subject of Shende’s works, which act as points of departure for the numerous issues and global concerns he addresses. His life size works represent objects and situations around us, through the deconstruction of the matter in the form of molecular discs of metal and portraits as a primary medium.

These discs symbolically represent atoms of solid, liquid and gas form, whereby science and physics, the base of existence, take on an important role. The highly reflective surfaces of the metal create a reflection of the viewer, making them a part of the work and vice versa. The work itself is a part of society that dismisses all forms of oblivion. Society, the system and one’s surrounding become an inevitable factor to identify with. The mediums used by the artist in his work act as symbols that translate meanings. These basic forms of symbols created the basis of language, and through language arose differences.

The ease with which Shende uses symbols within everyday Indian identities - from trucks, buffalos and tiffin-carriers to Buddha, Marx, grenades and scooters - to address issues in society, lends a unique perspective to identification across cultures and languages.

Though Shende’s imagery is strongly reflective of his surroundings, his works reference the global citizen. He says - “if you consider the world yours, there are no seams, no boundaries… the moment you look at yourself as a citizen of a country and not of the world, you limit yourself…”

In a system, where knowledge in manipulated to convenience of function, we human beings give ourselves up into societies that have laid down their rules based on needs two thousand years ago. For instance, the caste system, which was predominant in pre-Independent India, was abolished with amendments in the Constitution; however, it is still a prevalent under-current in a lot of activities and incidents that take place in India (particularly in rural regions). The form of the system is not a rewarding one - it determines our routines and we do not question it, but instead react to what the system has created of us.

Veeranganakumari Solanki
Art critic