In this duo presentation SANAA Gallery brings together the work of Imran Channa and Balta.
Imran Channa is a visual artist whose work critically engages with history, memory, media, and power. Balta is a text-based artist using language as a tool to deconstruct dominant historical narratives and to problematize underexposed stories.
Channa shows in his series Enchanted Land imagined landscapes, a perfect homeland, a paradise, generated by AI and reinserting the human hand by painting them. Balta’s work The Average Color of Paradise about what does paradise look like in the virtual world is based on search queries of the word paradise and is a deconstruction of paradise, visualized in colored flags.
In Tangible Fiction Channa animates the silent, non-human objects from the 1947
Partition archives by using a 3 D-printer. In Balta’s series Spam and Clouds she
combines digital tools with analogue and slow techniques such as embroidery.
In the booth works on paper, paintings, textile and 3D sculptures will be intertwined.
This duo show is a rich dialogue where narratives are questioned and visualized in
different forms in artworks, using technology and making the maker’s hand tangible.
For Sanne Bax, nature is a companion on her long solitary walks. The ceramic air mattress stands for the human presence in nature. While sleeping in a forest the trees become totemic guardians. Upon awakening, they find themselves fossilized in the dance they performed during the night. (Ceramics realized at EKWC)
