Artist Ali Akbar Mehta explains: “Survival today in a progressively more materialistic society requires us to be self-centred. Our lives have become the centre of our universe and we are the heroes of our own stories… We are replacing the ancient mythic heroes who ventured into the unknown, braved its dangers… yet lacking the courage to make the supreme sacrifice of self that would redeem humanity, we have lost the connection with out spiritual self.
“My work seeks to explore such ideas — with the intention of transforming myths in the modern context, to re-examine and re-evaluate the relationships that we take so much for granted. It is for me a personal engagement in trying to deal with the dualities of the spiritual and the material; suffering and rapture, life and death; and to understand thereby the mechanics of the desires that are dominating over lives.
“These are expressed or reinvented as it were, as decontextualised images: nudes, divorced from any social setting, displaced in both space and time to a neutral emotive space, itself in the throes of turbulent transformation that mirrors the emotive state of the liminal condition of the figures, or perhaps the social conditions from which they are born.”
Ali Akbar Mehta is the grandson of late Tyeb Mehta.
The show is at Tao Art Gallery from tomorrow till October 5. Tel: 24918585.