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4worldlovers: Todd Madigan Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the work of Jagdeep Raina. This is the artists first exhibition on the West Coast.

Beautiful Zameen is a series of works that explores the Green Revolution in Punjab. The Green Revolution—a U.S. sponsored agricultural framework based on high-yield seed varieties, intensive irrigation and drainage, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides—was implemented in the 1960s and has since damaged the landscape in Punjab by causing declining water tables, widespread soil erosion, low forest cover, and an epidemic of farmer suicides. Extending from that, global corporate involvement in agriculture, and neoliberal policies in India has led to India’s rapid increase in consumption, leading to further exploitation of natural resources.

The material history of South Asia is a central tenet of Raina’s practice. Many of his works possess a geometric border called a Phulkari, which is a traditional form of weaving on muslin cloth using hand-dyed and organic materials invented in Punjabi villages. The inclusion of the Phulkari in Raina’s work is significant, as following the fall of the Empire, the relinquishing of control over India by the British and the violent upheaval of the Partition, there was a mass disappearance and heavy destruction of many Phulkari pieces in Punjab. Globalization, the breakdown of Punjabi villages and workplace exploitation of Punjabi women has led to difficulties in the Phulkari’s renewal as a collective and collaborative form of art.

The drawings and embroidery in Beautiful Zameen—which means beautiful land— have emerged from Raina’s archival research, including a collaborative study of the playwright Satinder Chohan’s photography of the Green Revolution. Raina’s works depict farmers, agricultural land, and hands that hold crops and photographs, fusing his research with an ancestral material practice. He treats his subjects with care and commemoration, drawing attention to the everyday lived experiences and losses related to the Green Revolution, which was also the catalyst to an exodus of migrants to North America and the UK. Raina also explores material history through his films, which include video footage, stop motion animation, poetry, and music to position this textile within the Phulkari’s broader history.

Opening reception March 16, 2023, from 4 to 8 pm. From 4 to 5:30 pm the film Narmada: A Valley Rises by Ali Kazimi (1994, 87 minutes) will be screened in the Dore Theatre’s Albertson Room. The screening will be immediately followed by a conversation between Jagdeep Raina and writer Jhani Randhawa. From 6 to 8 pm there will be a reception for the exhibition in the Todd Madigan Gallery. All events are free and open to the public.

Observing with the precision of a documentarian, Jagdeep Raina renders figures and landscapes that linger somewhere between the “real” and the uncanny. Sometimes figures and the landscapes they are situated within blur, entangled, together. There are portraits within likenesses within images; there are entreaties stitched in English and Gurmukhi script; there are enlarged fragments of borders with an asemic poetry of their own; there are fragments of borders sewn into tapestries whose own asymmetric edges leave one with the sensation that, despite the acute distillation, something is lingering just out of frame. Something is within the material itself, tugging.

In Raina’s works on paper, such as “Those old roads” (2022), “Say hello when you see me,” (2022), and the monumental graphite work “I Will Love You Forever” (2022), a bestiary of pre-figural, elusive dream forms become harbingers of a transformed environment. Impressions of birds knock against their silence, tightly closed lips form a barrier around a village courtyard. Grammars of indigo, Punjab fog rolling in. Objects float like apparitions into view, undefined as if rubbed smooth by the rough edges of memory; in counterpoint, tools like the charkha spinning wheel and the ghara and the yoke and the tandoor are salvaged from soft erasure. Iconic, mysterious, and sudden, these forms interrupt our viewing. They trouble what can be known, what can be represented. Perhaps most provocatively, Raina’s forms trouble what can be bordered or delimited, particularly in the long “event” of the exhibition’s central catalyst: the Green Revolution.