Important Notice

Dividing his time between Southern California and South India, Bari Kumar’s work reflects the diverse social, religious and cultural forces that have shaped his experiences. A student of graphic design, the artist appropriates symbols and phrases from sources that range from Spanish street signs to Telengana text and Hindu religious images, carefully placing them on his canvas as if constructing a poster.

But Kumar’s poster-canvases... Dividing his time between Southern California and South India, Bari Kumar’s work reflects the diverse social, religious and cultural forces that have shaped his experiences. A student of graphic design, the artist appropriates symbols and phrases from sources that range from Spanish street signs to Telengana text and Hindu religious images, carefully placing them on his canvas as if constructing a poster.

But Kumar’s poster-canvases are more than just advertising gimmicks – they are intimate chronicles of ‘the other’ in a world without borders, and of the clash of religion and morality with this world’s digital consumer culture. His paintings, frequently executed in a somber palette of green and brown, are “clearly about the clash of several cultures -- including that of Latino Southern California -- in his own history. At the same time, like many young artists, he destabilizes what was once called identity politics by making his own position all but unlocatable” (Holland Cotter, “Art in Review”, The New York Times, 3/19 2004).

In this piece, Kumar plays on the word kalapani, inscribed in Devnagari at the upper right. The word literally means black water, but is used to refer to exile in general, and to the water-encircled Cellular Jail on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in particular. Here, the artist uses kalapani to refer to cultural exile, or existences, like his, that fall between various cultures. Rather than syncretism, Kumar seems to suggest that exclusion is the main consequence of cultural hybridity.

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