Sreshta Rit Premnath: Grave/Grove

<p>Sreshta Rit Premnath’s works — across sculpture, video, photography, and installation — appeal to formal legacies of minimalism and conceptualism, but often address the politics of boundaries, bodies, and labor in contemporary life. In the artist’s work, the use of a line, for example, is never neutral, but speaks to the power to demarcate and displace. The corrugated panels, cardboard and metal fencing, or cargo and freight materials that compose his works are not simply convenient modular readymades, but the raw material that visibly indexes “development” and the consolidation of wealth that often results. In recent years, questions of space — who can own or occupy it — have guided Premnath’s thinking, as have investigations of visibility, invisibility, and misrecognition as part of the everyday experiences of those who are marginalized. Premnath has written that “[t]he condition of being different — other — becomes a precondition for political possibility.” He goes on to say that “[t]he very bodies that do not count — that are dead to the social process — hold the key to reanimate the social.” Drawing from his own experience as an immigrant to the United States and an advocate for the rights of asylum seekers and incarcerated individuals, he uses allegory to propose alternatives to the status quo…</p>