MANSOOR ALI MAKRANI

Lives and works in Vadodara, Gujarat, India

Artist statement

Trained as a sculptor my understanding of ordinary objects came to be defined not only through their materiality but also their social lives and transformative ability - from their raw state to thing-ness, growing in value and utility, accumulating metaphors, disintegrating, and finally growing redundant but always with the potential to regenerate. With their immense power to shape and influence human interactions with the world around, objects to me were never objective. Objects tell tales of how humans shape their lives, values, social interactions, and political actions through acts of exchange, sale, gifting, collecting, archiving and exhibiting. An object is thus never innocent or apolitical. It is from here that I developed a visual vocabulary using everyday objects like chairs, bricks, and mirrors in my sculptural installations to craft a critique of institutions of power that distort social relations and dehumanize our relationships. Engaging with questions of history, communalism, corruption, faith and violence I take a critical view on issues that consistently corrode the foundation of democracies the world over. Other visual motifs such as barcodes, text and cracks coexist with my objects, transforming their original meaning and playing with visual and textual metaphors. By using linguistic and visual puns, and juxtaposing visual elements and playing with scale to create moments of irony, I consciously resort to humor and lived-experience as points of departure...

Artwork