The Baroda Annuelle Exhibition 2023 thematizes landscape in a way that makes us think about a genre with a long history. The artists featured in the show certainly position their work against a nineteenth-century Europe notion of the picturesque landscape, even while slyly invoking some of the tropes that were put in place at that time: nostalgia for lost landscapes, a desire for landscapes disappearing in our time. Urban landscapes (Indrapramit Roy) Covid landscapes, (Abir Karmakar), remembered landscapes (Satyanarayana Gavara, Subrat Behera), mythic landscapes (Sanket Viramgami) gendered landscapes (Malavika Rajnarayan, Neelima Nath) peopled landscapes (Ali Akbar PN, Alok Bal), unpeopled landscapes (KP Prasad, Ankush Safaya, Sneh Mehra), found here push and pull at the possibilities and limits of rendering the site. Yet, regardless of whether the representations are real or unreal, present or past, literal or fantastic, they speak of human presence and labor, and draw us into recognizing the human perspective and gaze.

Deeptha Achar