Human hunger is remarkably indiscriminate. It consumes spaces, resources, narratives and bodies. And only a few of us have the social digestive tract to actually process what we take in. The rest of us just discard the fallout without even a second thought.
We love data. We collect it, store it, format it into respectable statistics, and cite it to sound intelligent at dinner parties. But there's another kind of data we consume every day and never archive: the scene on the street corner, the cruelty we watch and don't stop, the structural anxiety we absorb without naming it. The everyday absurdity we take part in without noticing. It doesn't go to a server. It goes into our back pocket, and we carry it home.
That's how the elephants get into the room. It doesn't burst through the wall. We let it in, pour it, a cup of tea, and politely pretend it is an ottoman. Our collective inability to act on what we know thrives on a stacked deck. In a landscape bound by caste, class, and cultural hegemony, support is gated: some are born with a safety net, while the others are left to balance on a tightrope.
Paradoxically, that same "support" gets repackaged the moment it hits public space. City walls are covered in posters and pamphlets. Begging for solidarity, flaunting privilege or selling a mechanical, ad-driven utopia that never really arrives. And in our obsessive chase for an automated, optimized world, we've arrived somewhere unsettling: perhaps only machines can afford to be rational.
Human apathy makes us deliciously, dangerously irrational. It turns extreme experiences into background noise, and quietly fertilizes the soil for hate to bloom. Caste, class, race and gender; these monsters feed on our silence until they are demanded annihilation.
Yet, we weren't always wired to step back and watch the rot set in. Before we learned these hierarchies and swallowed public lies, we had a different impulse. One that precedes language, posture, and political conditioning. A newborn enters the world with fists closed tight: a subconscious gesture of solidarity before it even has words. We start with that innate innocence. Then the world gets to work on us. We morph, adapt, unlearn the fist and embrace paralysis.
What if the spine, twisted into a perpetual spiral, exposes more than just a story of defeat, or of defiance? Existing instead as an ongoing record; the body, still coiling under generations of forced respect, of relentless physical labour, of survival, passed down, all of them mutating under authority.
The urge to control also shows up in the trapping of a cloud. Depending on where you stand, a cloud means hope or it means catastrophe. And by boxing something that vast and that free, Barve turns a feeling into a specimen. It's our old, ridiculous need to measure and own what was never built to be held.
Package everything, control everything, and a fault in the system stops being a risk and starts being a certainty. But what if the script breaks? What if the teleprompter, the glassy conduit of manufactured authority, starts speaking on its own, exposing the hollow rehearsal of power?
What if we traced how easily we're tricked by carefully managed distractions, conditioned to chase the showbiz spectacle while the machinery of power operates unchecked in our blind spot? Or think of an endless gamble of a die locked in motion, always rolling, never settling: we're left waiting, alert, ready for whatever face it shows, because survival says we have to be.
And what if the very land beneath our feet, heavy with centuries of disputes, caste ownership, buried grievances, finally starts to speak back? Would we even listen? Or would we just mute the feedback?
Before we built the empires and the hierarchies, everything began with simpler geometries. Barve goes back to that layer through a blue glass mirror. The basic shapes our whole physical and visual reality is built from. Stand in front of it and your own reflection fractures within these primal forms. It's a quiet reminder of our shared material origin that strips away all the social stratification, to reveal that beneath our constructed divides, we are all built from the same basic code.
The exhibition asks us to explore how our understanding shifts across varying angles, perspectives and emotional weights. Operating alongside this inquiry is a restless tension between the handmade and the machine-made, probing the visual and affective friction that sparks when human touch collides with automated precision.
And then comes the anti-climax.
The ultimate puncture. You build the discourse, debate the oppression, publish the manifesto, wait for the land to roar or the teleprompter to confess. And the whole empire, the whole enterprise, collapses into one grand, wet squib.
Tayen Tayen Fish!
There's a tragic, funny, deeply human innocence in that deflation. It's the sound of high ambitions hitting cold realities. It's the political rally where the mic cuts out right at the climax, leaving the orator left mouthing promises at a sea of blank faces and fluttering pamphlets. It is the multi-crore start-up built to fight poverty that ends up delivering laundry faster.
We build arguments, write critiques, express outrage and even resist, believing we are challenging the system. But caste, class, capital, and power are so deeply rooted in the system, that they can absorb, weaken, or simply dismiss all of it, eventually grinding them down into a tiny, unceremonious pfft.
However, there's a strange comfort in this pathetic collapse. In a culture obsessed with viral moments and apocalyptic downfalls, the tayen tayen fish refuses to even give us the drama of failure. No martyrdom. No spectacular defeat. Just the bizarre, domestic reality of blowing up a balloon and watching it zip erratically around the room before landing flat on the floor.
To acknowledge the "fish", isn't to give up; it is to laugh at the size of our own ego in the face of machine-like systems. It is the comic relief of being human in an unbearable landscape, finding a little slice of acceptance, right at the moment our illusion pops.
Barve's work sits right inside that deflated space: dissecting the mechanisms that keep us paralyzed, while staring right through the grand, absurd fizzle of it all.
Text by Saviya Lopes
Solo exhibition by Yogesh Barve
