It’s a big, bad world out there

Bad Breath is a unique exhibition of pictures by renowned artists Sanjeev Khandekar and Vaishali Narkar which depict the refrigerator and its innards as a metaphor for the modern human being and his modern lifestyle.  “Consumerism has grown so much today that it has taken over our identity as a human being,” says Sanjeev. “Everything has become ‘thingified’ including human beings. Today if you are employed with a company, you are considered nothing more than a profit making centre. Your life is judged by the profits and losses you make and not by who you are. The money you earn is ‘cost to company’ and not your ‘salary’. With my pictures, I am questioning this whole process of ‘thingification’ and to what extent it has impacted us,” explains Sanjeev. The idea of the exhibition is mocking the current consumeristic lifestyle. The refrigerator is a mechanised cubical human being which has ‘frozen fresh’ food stuffed inside it. “The unlikely bounties of consumerism draw us to densely occupied supermarket aisles and keeps our bellies busy with knots of self-defecating confusion. The products in a supermarket somehow have gained more control over our minds. They have the power to tell us to take them home, even when we don’t need them. I, sometimes, wonder how much can you consume after all?” says Sanjeev.  “We reach home and store them in the refrigerator. After a few days the refrigerator starts emitting a peculiar smell of this frozen food. The food is symbolic of the human desires and the foul smell is representative of them rotting inside our minds,” he says.  The exhibition features a series of 15 pictures of the refrigerator taken from various inside-out angles. A sculpture called Fresh plastic flowers has also been installed to ridicule the artificial lives we are living. Bad Breath is on at the Matthieu Foss Gallery, Ballard Estate,  till May 12.