Carte Blanche A Manish Pushkale: To Whom the Bird Should Speak?

Contents: Foreword. Preface/Dr Yannick Lintz. 1. To whom the bird should speak?/Claire Bettinelli. 2. Manish Pushkale in conversation with Devika Singh/Devika Singh. 3. The vanishing languages and an artist’s meditation on the many lives of words/Ganesh N. Devy. 4. Pourtant, temps, espace Yet, space and time/Ashok Vajpeyi. 5. Manish Pushkale: Artist Biography. Contributors’ biographies. Acknowledgements.

Manish Pushkale, born in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, is an autodidact who honed his artistic style and sensibility at Bharat Bhavan’s fertile and creativity-filled ambience of the time. His engagement at the art centre cemented Pushkale’s deep engagement with indigenous folk and tribal traditions. The installation To Whom the Bird Should Speak? is a visual enquiry into the significance of language as a medium of communication. Pushkale’s artistic research into indigenous cultures was inspired by the story of the Aka-Bo tribe in the Andaman Islands and their oral tradition of communicating with birds that was lost to the world after the death of its last speaker, Boa Sr.

As a contemporary artist and an abstract painter, Pushkale works at the intersection of linguistics and archaeology in an immersive 125 square metres of hand-painted installation, as he imagines a visual ‘script’ of a lost history that we would like to recover, or should it be allowed to fade inexorably into oblivion?