Nothing From My Hands, 2011-12
Granite, 67″ x 54″ x 64″
Alwar Balasubramaniam (aka Bala) continues his pursuit of bringing to form the formless and making us realize the potential of the hidden. Nothing From My Hands brings together two of Bala’s major conceptual pursuits. For over a decade the artist has been casting works using his own body and placing himself literally between the art and the viewer, negotiating the skin as an edge where one’s own individual physical self ends and everything else begins. Employing the cast from his hands, he materializes a form that exists only when the hands are clasped and ceases to exist when they are opened. However, by casting that space he has allowed us to view that which would not be visible directly. This casting method also enables the interior (between the hands) to become the exterior.
“Our respect for material reality is more than that for the non material and non visible, we think of nothing as negative. I am attempting here to show even nothing is something beautiful.”
-Alwar Balasubramaniam
Knot, 2010 (detail)
Iron, 28" x 142"
Alwar Balasubramaniam (Bala) was born in 1971 in Tirunelveli, India. He received a BFA from the Government College of Arts, Chennai, India, in 1995 after which he continued his studies in Edinburgh and Vienna. In 1998 he was artist in residence at The MacDowell Colony in NH after which he returned to Bangalore, where he lived and practiced till 2015. Subsequently, Bala returned to his native village near Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu and embarked on creating his home and studio in the countryside, where he continues to live and work.
Bala’s works have been featured in exhibitions worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington; École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France; Essl Museum, Austria; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia, 1st Singapore Biennale; and 18th Sydney Biennale. In 2001 he was given the Joan Miro foundation award accompanied by a solo exhibition. Bala has been a guest lecturer at the Art Department of Cornell University in Ithaca, NY and a featured speaker at TED.
