Kareena Solanki

DB Type

Open Calls: DB

Open Calls

Open Calls: Artianne Magazine #1

Artist Full Name

Kareena Solanki

Birthdate

1998
June
23

Artist Statement

Where does one find the sacred within the daily mundane existence of life?

My work delves into the intricate interconnectedness of the psychic & the political, the existential & economic, the spiritual and the social, the sacred and profane.

I explore glitches within the individual and collective identity, the myths surrounding it, the fallacy of its immutability, transculturation, hybridity, truth, and the interconnected histories of belief systems. My work explores contradictions and paradoxes existing within the role of meaning-making and the construction of reality through a post-medium approach. I immerse myself in my practice through creating performance rituals and relics while reflecting on the emotional, spiritual, and physical endurance required to live in a world of suffering. These rituals allow my body and mind to enter states of transcendence, transfiguration, vulnerability, and unfamiliarity, opening up limitless potentials in the present moment. I reflect on the role of encounter, exchange, and the environment in cultivating the human through embodied practice.

Materials and techniques in my practice navigate the space between craft and neo-craft. Through an interplay with materiality, I inquire into the re-creation, repetition and reproduction of belief systems and the means of mechanical reproduction of thought and perception through advanced technologies.

In Saṃsāra, I inquire into the re-creation, repetition and reproduction of belief systems by infusing AI images of multiple religions with ordinary materials. These relics come together to build the material culture continually permeating the bodies interacting with them. I reflect on the material reality of sacred mythologies and the fallacies of religious purity and absolutism through algorithmic irregularities embedded within AI systems. I replicate the ornateness of religious structures of carving and embroidery through mechanized processes, thus reflecting on the means of mechanical reproduction of thought and perception through advanced technologies.

The performance places my body in direct relation to the environment, questioning the techniques for producing sensibilities through embodied practice and ritual and its role in cultivating the human. I inquire into the phenomenon of encounter through the slow release of water in space. I bear the weight of my hands cast in clay, and question the beauty and burden of devotion.

The work obscures reality through memory, presents paradoxes and portrays a series of interconnected algorithms within the human and the artificial, the tangible and intangible, mundane and spiritual. Through generating multiple patterns with various permutations and combinations, I reflect on the plurality of traditions and norms amid which we exist and deflect the binary, monolithic identity. I situate my work within the tensions of artistic authenticity, cultural authority, the impossibility of the algorithm, and its fundamental dependence on material production.

Biography

Kareena Solanki is an interdisciplinary artist pursuing her MFA at James Madison University, Virginia, originally from Mumbai, India. Before this, she completed her undergraduate studies in Product Design at MIT Institute of Design, India. Her work has been part of shows in the US, UAE, and South Korea.