sceneries 1

Prajakta Palav Aher's recombinant landscapes evoke the beauty and terror of the sublime by seamlessly stitching diverse elements together: for instance, she takes a 'scenery' sourced from Google Earth and melds it with the photograph of a mountain in a Bombay suburb that has become invisible beneath the overgrowth of slums that it now bears. These paintings deftly mongrelise our experience of landscape painting; they mimic the magisterial scale and presence of high art, but also refer to the angelic 'sceneries' (as they are described in many Indian regional languages, the word adapted from English), cheap landscape posters