SEEDS IN A RUINED CITY

Seeds in a Ruined City reflects the fragmented realities of urban life. Coming from a village, Triveni Prasad Tiwari was overwhelmed by the chaos and struggle of a growing Indian city. Dark slippery roads, green and red traffic lights, burgeoning buildings sprouting in every direction, and the complete loss of connection to the very soil on which they stood. The earth held captive in concrete. He is struck by the paradox of prodigious technology and inner poverty, and in the face of urbanisation, his work asks, how seeds could grow without soil? What is the fate of a seed in a concrete city, where there are rooms but no home, bonsai but no Banyan”.

He describes his work as a song about the chaos of his time, about abundance contrasting with desperation. About ephemeral notions of perfection, surrounded by information, digital media and the internet. A virtual world at odds with inner life. The sprouting stoneware chickpea seeds are constricted in concrete and rebar and some lie scattered on the ground beside the pillars.

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TRIVENI PRASAD TIWARI is a gold medalist in Pottery Ceramic and Design from Banaras Hindu University. He works at the Garhi Centre, Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi and has participated in several group shows in Delhi and Mumbai, and in the 56th National Exhibition of Art by the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi in 2014-15. His first solo show, BEEJAK…Search for Soil was in 2016 in New Delhi. He won the AIFACS, New Delhi award thrice, and the Prafulla Dahanukar Art Foundation, Mumbai award in Ceramics and Painting. In 2017 he participated in a National Artist Camp for Ceramics in Garhi, Delhi.