Khwaish Gahlaut

My practice is an inquiry into the role of memories in human experience. I understand memory as the fragile imprint of reality left behind after it comes to an end. We carefully entwine these memories, and imprints with each other as well as our imagination into a soft braid, that flows and sways and grows with us but each strand, each imprint has its own life cycle, some fall, some we forcefully pull out, caressing our bodies, our lives as it breaks away and leaves in its wake uncertainty like goosebumps on our skin left by the single sliding, falling hair strand. As these imprints leave us we try to fill in the gaps of these

impressions with our own understanding of reality, turning into illusions, almost - Dreamlike. These Memories are imprints of what once was true and as they entangle with our realities, our truth as well as our imagination, they turn grey, lies. Necessary lies, as they shape our experiences, relations and understanding.

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At times we encompass these memories and designate them to various objects, creating mementoes and turning them from a thing into a being. To me the human body can be looked at as an archive of one's experiences, we are silhouettes. The human body is to our experiences what the brain is to our mind - a repository. I imagine art to be a repository, a memento - a being, a thing that has consciousness as it archives and stores our collective memories as human beings.

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Transparent acrylic sheets play an important role in my multidisciplinary art practice. I paint on these sheets with acrylics and watercolours, layering them together to create intricate compositions that merge multiple visuals. This layering technique is central to my work, playing with proportions and perspectives. The direction in which my practice is progressing presents a complex, almost confusing image where the overlapping elements seem to merge together in some places and stand out in others but when broken down these are simple visuals of the common. My visual language stems from a sensitive exploration of the everyday “usual” things in my environment. These simple and at times biographical

images referenced from photographs and memories turn into symbols that weave together to create the narratives within my art.