The Open Studio / Krishna Ganapati
Krishna Ganapati
Unboxing
Cardboard boxes, cut and scraped until they look like stone
Brown card, the colour of dry laterite.
Long grooves run down it like rain has found the same path for years.
At the edges the layers open, thin as pages.
Sun falls flat and warm on one side.
A white sheet hangs behind, a tiled floor below.
Something that once held things now stands alone, upright and still.
The work
Unboxing is a tall column made from carton boxes and synthetic glue. It stands 182 cm high. Its sides are cut and scraped into deep grooves. The layers of card show at the edges like bands of rock in a cliff. Krishna Ganapati comes from Mavinkurva, near Honnavar, a place of laterite soil, coconut plantations and backwaters. Ganapati's work looks at how people change the land through extraction, construction and development. Here packing material becomes something that seems dug from the earth.
In the artist’s words
“My practice explores how landscapes are changed through human interventions and how land slowly becomes a commodity through extraction, construction and development. I don't want to just represent a landscape. I want to show the layers of what has happened to it: what has been removed, added, changed or left behind.”
- Theme
- Land changed by people
- Material
- Carton box and synthetic glue
- Size
- 182 × 90 × 90 cm
- Year
- 2026
- Edition
- 1
- Framed
- No
- About the artist
- SN School of arts and communication, University of Hyderabad
- From
- Hyderabad
- Code
- RC-417
