Iridescent ink hand embellished on silk screen print on 450gsm archival cotton rag paper
cm. 61x61 each. Framed
Amitabh Kumar is a Bangalore based artist and educator. He is currently exploring tendencies, treatments and stories of varied kinds influenced by anti-humanism, clumsy menace, brutalist architecture, cinema, Tijuana Bible and Indian superhero comics. These tendencies have been pushed across multiple formats such as comics, moving image projects, products, publications, commercial illustrations and paintings.
Five Flags of the Black Sun is part of The Kapaal Ghantu project, a series of horror-comedy comic books situated in and around Amitabh Kumar’s hometown of Mussoorie and the farther reaches of the Garhwal region in the Himalayas.
The current sequence of images explore the world of Kapaal Ghantu and set the scenography for adventures to unfold. It draws upon legends, myths and rumours that Kumar grew up with. It's a satire borne out of the ecological crisis ignored by a studious blind eye, where an absurd premise finally culminates into a gory battle between the spiritual tourism economy and the tech-enabled singularity vision.
Written in Hindi, the story that the current set of images respond to are :
कुछ देर बाद आपकी आंखें को
अंधेरे की आदत हो जाती है
और आप समझ जातेहैकी
ये अधंकार है, मैं अंधा नहीं हूं
"After some time your eyes
get used to the darkness
And you understand the hack
This is darkness, I am not blind"
** Please note that the lot is located with its present owner in India. Shipping costs will therefore be subject to international rates.