RICARDO FRAYHA
producer

From a small rural town in the state of Gujarat, in 2008 Daku arrived in the megacity and capital of India, Delhi. Alienated in its vastness, he thought of  the practice of sign painters in his region with their bold typographic messages diffused over public spaces while seeing for the first time through the web the creative actions of graffiti writers around the world. With his pseudonym – Daku - which in Hindi means bandit, he combined these expressions spreading his “tag” both in English and Hindi all across the city. The usage of text never left his practice and intertwined with the investigation over the concept of time within our ephemeral “liquid” society. Impalpable artworks activated by the sun formed his first experiments with time and shadows, whereas they become a commentary on the fast pace of our lives as well as on the art system. Against the idea of art as a commodity at par with all the other goods which we worship and consume, his works are not saleable but invaluable - they are pure appearances, visual and conceptual reflections. Daku opened up a moment of contemplation and patience in an attempt of breaking the mechanisms which command our existence. In cities which never stop, where the time is accelerated and strictly measured upon its value, he roots back to the sun. He travels between the visible and invisible, the real and fantastical and all other primogenital dualisms, leading to a continuous personal evolution. Within this framework, this artistic intervention arrives on tiptoe and melts with the context as if in a sort of aesthetic and conceptual continuity where a fourth dimension - the time, opens on the space of the wall. In the relativity of time, it seems as if one can almost perceive the imperceptible movement of time as a delicate and intimate dance - an endless dance that keeps happening everyday, an endless research which we can only hope to witness if space and time will coincide with Daku’s journeys.

​

​

EXPERIMENTS WITH TIME AND SHADOWS

​

Artist: Daku | Curatorial text: Giulia Ambrogi

Photos: Akshat Nautiyal, Pranav Gohil, Jai Upadhyay | Artist's manager: Arjun Bahl, Priyanka Mehra | Artist's assistants: Rutva Trivedi, Pragyesh Parmar, Ravi Patel, Pritish Srinivasan

​

Production in Brazil: prod.art.br | Production directors: Ricardo Frayha, Ricardo Muniz Fernandes | Technical director: Julio Cesarini | Technical assistant: Vinícius Cardoso | Production assistant: Aline Olmos | Technicians: André Rossaneis, Enrique Casas, Fernando Zimolo, Mariana Mastrocola, Rafael Alcântara, Wanderley Wagner da Silva
 

Realisation: Sesc São Paulo
Sesc Santo André

Santo André, SP, Brazil

10/12/2019 to 01/03/2020