From small scale multimedia drawings to wide panel works, Saju Kunhan uses wood and archival images to articulate the voices of the unheard. With maps and spaces, he creates a mythical world built from history, and prompts questions of where we are, how we got here and where we will go from here. The active movement in this particular landscape, reminds us of those labourers displaced, and the voices that go unheard, in need of care and reconciliation.

According to Anuj Daga, “as a cartographic entity, Saju Kunhan’s reconstructions embrace the aesthetic strategy of vintage maps that are often framed with illustrated strips along the borders of the canvas, and are presented on sepia stained backgrounds. The overall map is an assembly of smaller pieces of wooden panels laid in a neat grid that gives the impression of folds that appear on a pocket map, and those that also divide our viewing of map into parcels. In addition, the map-images are divided into margins of standard paper sizes that were originally used for transfer of prints. These margins reposition the overall resultant image within new coordinates that may be read as meridians of migration and displacement. Working within, and yet challenging the schema of the cartographic map, Saju’s artworks gently attempt to destabilize our habitual reading of a map. Further, the grains of the wood soon start reading as an image that imprint time onto the otherwise empirical Google Maps.”