There is no God in the Temple

The Exhibition ‘There is no God in the Temple’ at Threshold Art Gallery, New Delhi, is a response to the current status of art, artifacts, and monuments in Shaurya Kumar’s country of birth – India. The show draws its title from a poem by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore penned in 1900 where the king is rebuked by a devout hermit, who chooses to reject the materialistic grandeur of the newly constructed temple and elects to become an ascetic rather than remain in the king’s “bubble of gold and pride.” This sentiment is echoed by many citizens and devotees who, in the recent past, have found their shrines and altars emptied out by looters or destroyed by extremists and iconoclasts, sometimes replaced by replicas or newly “manufactured” idols. While each work in the exhibition reflects the fractured past and story; gentle manipulation of existing documentation through structural, data and contextual transposition eludes the original narrative, and these objects are assigned new meanings. In the words of University of Iowa Professor Anita Jung, “Kumar’s work encourages us to consider these vital questions: What will we retain? What will become eroded? What through time and age will we be losing? Kumar’s work becomes an allegorical tale cautioning us to be aware, to actively be discerning and safeguarding our history as it belongs to those who come after us as much as the monuments, oceans, forests, and great works of art we document.”