Pooja Iranna: Contemplating The Urban
© Pooja Iranna
Over the years that I have practiced as a photographer, I have always been very inquisitive about a certain freedom I have witnessed while observing various other visual artists who use multi disciplinary practices and have enjoyed how the amalgamation of a photograph with various multi media can help enhance one’s work and expression.
I have always questioned the perception of one’s reality and wondered if photography as an art form can push itself beyond its existing and accepted physicality. In a world of technology and immense possibilities, where today art is more of an idea and without any restriction as a form, why do we segregate photography from other art forms ? Why do we still end up questioning it’s purity, in a world that has over the years accepted the marriage of painting, sculpture, installation, performance, video, sound and even added photographs to this changing, non discriminatory and a flexible world of creative forms?
Pooja’s use of photograpic imagery playfully juxtaposes multiples layers with her technique and her introspection that overlaps the past, the present and a perception of the future. She is an artist of multiple skills and has used painting, sculpture, installation, video and photography to deal with her visual exploration as an artist. She over the years adapted the use of the new media taking her vision to multiple surreal levels.
Pooja clearly quotes that “ The use of the lens gives her the opportunity to express the changes around her with help of the contemporary spaces in form of digitally manipulated photographs and videos”. Her works gives the viewer the opportunity to question that new world full of changes while just flowing along with it. Somewhere her still imagery and the moving images, both transport you to another universe so suddenly, that we start to accept it as our present reality with the past somehow getting erased out of our minds.
Pooja has been deciphering and referencing her perspective on urbanization and globalization as a generation that grew up in the national capital of India, witnessing a stark change in the pattern of the world of consumerism in a span of a few decades. She uses the architectural spaces leading our minds to an unknown space of discomfort and edginess.
Her career as an artist has evolved to adapt her vision and expression along with the vast visual changes she continues to immerse herslf into. The choice of photographic images, moving images and the digital execution is well planned, rather than a random exploration.
The videos and digital photographic imagery we experience as a part of her journey as an artist and an urban being give us a stonger, deeper and richer context towards creating a curiousity leading us to a harsh yet poetic conclusion.
© Sandeep Biswas, 2019