08/06/2026
When the Ground Shifts was the inaugural exhibition in August, 2025 at Ark 1A, “...an interim site for conversation, experimentation, ideation, research, and dialogue…(and)...the presentation reflects the Foundation’s commitment to revisiting the Baroda legacy while expanding its resonances within South Asian modern and contemporary art.”
The archive team created a research wall, assembling scanned archival documents that reflected our evolving ideas around Ark Archive through key themes and conceptual markers such as -static, , , , and .
One of the exhibited documents was a brief essay titled Why and How I paint by Jeram Patel (1930-2016). The text was originally published in June 1967 in the issue no. 5-6 of Contra, a magazine edited by J. Swaminathan, under the title I do not Create. In the magazine, Jeram Patel is introduced as a painter, a founder-member of the Group 1890, and the Head of the Department of Applied Art at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda. In the article, the highly regarded abstractionist Jeram Patel outlines a philosophy of destruction as creation. He emphasizes that his process rejects traditional painting techniques in favor of visceral, spontaneous, and existential expressions.
Several inscriptions and handwritten annotations are visible on this scanned document, including “Jeram Patel”, “189”, and “1966”. The most significant notation, however, reads: “This article was reprinted for the catalogue of the “Anthological Exhibitions” of the XIV SAO PAULO BIENNALE 1977”.
