Jagannath Panda on “The Cult of Survival II”

New Delhi-based artist Jagannath Panda lives in the burgeoning city of Gurgaon, which is one of India’s major outsourcing hubs and bases of operation for global corporations. His works illustrate the city’s tensions, as overdevelopment threatens natural habitats and infrastructures collapse before they are completed. Panda’s mix of mythology and realism points to the evolving nature of Indian identity and experience today. His snake sculpture, “The Cult of Survival,” is an expression of the danger in becoming addicted to the cycle of production and consumption in a rapidly changing world. “The inter-entangled form of sewage pipes awakens the human condition,” he says, “the instinct of survival and the ecology of death and renewal of life.” View this work in the Phantoms of Asia: Contemporary Awakens the Past exhibition at the Asian Art Museum (May 18 – September 2, 2012).