An Index of Disobedience
BHARATHESH GD
14 August - 27 September 2025
Curated by Amshu Chukki
Artworks
An Index of Disobedience
Text by AMSHU CHUKKI
Trained as both a painter and an art historian, Bharathesh G D works across painting, sculpture, video, sound, and conceptual practice to interrogate the power and politics of images. Raised in Davangere, Karnataka—an industrial hub shaped by mill workers, cotton traders, and a thriving cinema culture—he grew up painting film banners and splicing reels alongside his father, a cinema cutout artist and projectionist. These early encounters with the tactile infrastructures of image-making—plywood, poster paint, projection reels—form the scaffolding of a practice deeply attuned to spectacle and its subversion. In his latest body of work, Pain Corporation of INDIA (2024–25), Bharathesh returns to the visual languages of film, street signage, and propaganda to explore how images discipline public life in an era of deepfakes, AI-generated mythologies, and weaponized virality. Large plywood cutouts—painted in fluorescent poster tones—echo the larger-than-life political and cinematic icons once installed outside theatres and rally grounds, only here they glitch, collapse, and resist worship. A key work, Too Much Democracy…, presents hundreds of hand-painted dental plaster reliefs—voting-marked fingers, police barricades, Swachh Bharat logos—hung in plastic kirana-style pouches like mass-produced offerings to a broken democracy. What emerges is not nostalgia, but a refusal. Bharathesh’s work mimics the very forms it seeks to undo, creating friction through scale, material, and repetition. The result is a visual index of disobedience—where the image no longer affirms, but fractures. In this unstable terrain, meaning is not consumed, but contested—bit by bit, symbol by symbol. - Amshu Chukki
Bharathesh GD
Bharathesh G D is a Bangalore-based artist, curator, researcher, and educator whose practice moves across painting, video, sound, installation, photography, and performative objects. With a background in both studio-based painting and art historical research (BFA, Government College of Fine Arts, Dharwad; MVA in Art History, Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath), Bharathesh’s multidisciplinary approach interrogates abstraction, belief, and image-making through shifting constellations of form and thought.
Over the past two decades, his work has explored the politics of perception and the affective power of signs, often engaging non-linear narratives and ephemeral material processes. His long-term projects—such as GOD Conditions Apply, Sound Signatures, and the recent Pain Corporation of INDIA (2024–25)—dissect the visual languages of divinity, democracy, and dissent, staging installations that operate as both meaning machines and critiques of symbolic violence.
He has exhibited widely in India and internationally, including at the Indian Art Fair (2024), Serendipity Arts Festival, gallery Espace, Stadtgalerie Bern (Switzerland), and Theertha Red Dot Gallery (Colombo). His teaching spans over a decade across leading architecture and design schools in Bangalore. Bharathesh’s practice is marked by a deep commitment to process, pedagogy, and the unstable relationship between image, memory, and political imagination.
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Amshu Chukki
Amshu Chukki is a multidisciplinary artist based in Bengaluru, India. His site-informed practice explores new ways of articulating landscapes and urban environments, attending to the visible and not-so-visible interconnections between life, cinema, urbanity, infrastructure, politics, and fiction. In his work, the landscape becomes a field of inquiry—where various communities and their idiosyncrasies come together, initiating conversations from localized micro-contexts that expand outward to broader narratives.
The various textures of material and location in his work come together to overlap in conversation with history, fantasy, site, and resistance. His experimental films often spill out into drawings, sculptures, and installations that attempt to stage the city as a protagonist.
Chukki holds a postgraduate degree from the M.S. University of Baroda. His recent solo exhibition, Different Danny and Other Stories, was held at Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai, in 2022. He has participated in several group exhibitions and screenings, including Visualising African-Asian Worlds, NYUAD, Abu Dhabi (2024); Cloak and Dagger: India’s Fictional Times, Zuzeum Art Centre, Riga, Latvia (2021); From Cinema, AI(R)C Artists in Revolution Collective, Los Angeles (2021); Chennai Photo Biennale (2018); TURN OF THE TIDE – 20/20 Artists for KHOJ, New Delhi (2018); Asia Film Focus: Time Machine, Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore (2017); and India: Maximum City, St. Moritz Art Masters, Switzerland.
He has been awarded international residencies including the St. Moritz Art Academy, Switzerland (2022); The Darling Foundry – India–Québec Residency, Montreal, Canada (2015); and Coriolis Effect: Currents across India and Africa at KHOJ, New Delhi (2015). Chukki is a recipient of the Space Studio Artist’s Grant (2021), the Forbes 30 Under 30 recognition for Visual Arts (2016), and the INLAKS Fine Arts Award (2014).
