Shiva Addanki

A motorcycle doubles over in flames. Its supine metallic body merges with the train tracks. In the sky, upside down: abstraction and a flower. Eventually the iron will oxidize into rust, turning vibrant orange, red, blue, and green. This process brings it closer to the earth despite the exploitation of burning rubber. In Bihar, protesters demanding military recruitment reform burnt their motorcycles in coordinated action. They set fire to the roads and the trains. Elsewhere on the subcontinent, a mangled car bears the vestiges of a BJP flag. A man watches over, leaning against a tree. Across these five paintings, technologies of globalization become memorials—the train, the car, the motorcycle. They help us remember the sheer speed at which history is rewritten, producing palimpsest out of surplus labor in order to obscure capital accumulation. Indian okra is grown year-round in Honduras.

In The Battle of Algiers (1966), an incarcerated Ali La Pointe, hero of the FLN, gazes out from his prison cell into the dawn of political radicalization. Wrought iron frames his eyes, which transform into a motif of defiance throughout the film, then sampled in the painting Savage Wars of Peace. We move from citation to insurgency within one landscape. We reach for a counterhistory that refracts the margins and their victories to the center. The martyr shrine of Māhaprasthanam is the color of fire. Reverbs of violence are everywhere, bouncing off of everything. The few gasps of blue sky are like an overture. Above the burning motorcycle, cloudless atmosphere. The prison bars framing La Pointe’s eyes are sky blue. Then, الطائرات الشراعیة [brazen hell] drops us into the prison break. It feels surreal—imminent transformation. Rugged paragliders trace the vault of heaven, horizon wider than ever before.

—Sanjana Iyer

Shiva Addanki (b. 1994, NY) lives and works in New Brunswick, NJ, where he is an MFA candidate at Rutgers University. He has shown work in autonomous spaces including Bullet Space and Property is Theft. This is his debut NYC solo exhibition.