Galerie Caroline O'Breen

Technique: Diptych | Gouache and watercolour on paper, framed with museum glass | 42,5 x 54 cm & 22,9 x 30,5 cm

Authenticity: Work signed by the artist, Certificate provided

Edition: Unique work

Price range: € 4.000 - € 6.000

Framed, exc. VAT

Status: for sale

Hybrid Being 9. Svadhintapatika and The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, 2023

The series Hybrid Beings aims to decolonize women’s bodies and the sovereignty of nature. To envision new ontological entanglements it intersects boundaries of speculative fiction, archetypal allegories, and precarious ecologies. The paintings of Manjot propose a number of situations and stories to imagine forms of relationality and mutuality between bird species (both endangered and extinct) and selected heroines who belong to the Ashta-Nayika: a collective term for eight heroines, each of whom represents different states in relationship to her hero resulting in hybrid beings(they/them). This painting narrates a story about the relationship between Svadhintapatika Nayika (the heroine whose lover is wholly devoted to her) and The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. The Hybrid Beings respond to the ecological grief and loneliness by postulating a queer ecology where the endangered bird becomes the hero, replacing the male patriarchal figure from the context of Ashta-Nayika. Hybrid Beings generate hope and care to cultivate the capacity to reimagine a future for the marginalized and the silenced. They speculate on near futures and rethink the notions of identity and interdependency. They stitch together improbable collaborations between humans and more-than-humans, making way for kinship. Hybrid Beings push back against the centering of the human and move toward thinking that eradicates the hierarchy of being and challenges the human / non-human binary. These hybrid beings open up possibilities for a post-queer and post-human world where species move away from questions of identity, recognition, or representation towards an uncanny kind of becoming.