Drawing its title from Chantal Akerman’s formative film, “News from Home” unites new works from Mumbai-based visual artist Biraaj Dodiya and Polish interdisciplinary artist Cezary Poniatowski. The exhibition, which comes to a close at the contemporary gallery Galerie Derouillon tomorrow, interrogates the way we construct environments with our emotions, experiences, and traumas. Notably, it is the first time the artists’ works have been put in conversation with each other in France.
Courtesy of the artist
and Galerie Derouillon, Paris. © Anil Rane
Biraaj Dodiya’s Ruins in the Making
Dodiya’s tense, moody paintings range from large-scale swaths of darkness to a small, intricate installation of three canvases side by side. Together, the works bring to mind a society on the brink of collapse. Two of the paintings, Carrying glass (2024) and Suspended Vanishings (2024) stand over six feet tall and envelop the viewer in their density. A triptych of oil on linen paintings are much smaller—they each are the size of a book—but feel equally weighty. Perhaps most formidable is Tightrope (2024), a cross-shaped wood carving smeared with thick smudges of dark paint. In its overt three-dimensionality, the piece juts out from the gallery wall and creates a bridge between the viewer and her environment. Dodiya repeatedly layers paint and materials in the exhibition, playing with light and darkness to create unexpected shapes.
Courtesy of the artist
and Galerie Derouillon, Paris. © Grégory Copitet
Cezary Poniatowski Creates Anxiety with Charged Memories of Polish Domesticity
Poniatowski’s works are more occupied with the political. For “News from Home,” the artist sourced a variety of everyday materials used in Poland before the fall of the Eastern bloc—imitation leather, carpets, polystyrene insulation board—charged with memories from the time he spent there in the 1990s. The result is a collection of works that feel eerily lived-in, prompting a sense of fantastical anxiety as the viewer wonders what these materials may have seen in their past lives. Untitled (III) (2024) and Untitled (IV) (2024) may simply look like plush, clunky armchairs at first glance, but in fact they are textured with decades of history and stitched together with cable ties. The viewer’s Kafkaesque unease only deepens upon witnessing the plume of vapor that billows out of each chair.
Courtesy of the artist
and Galerie Derouillon, Paris. © Grégory Copitet
For both artists, the body is always suggested by the traces it leaves on objects and the places it passes through. The exhibition implores its viewer to confront the collapse they feel coming on—not ignore it.
“News from Home” is on view until October 5.
