Decrypt Home I, 2024

Shashikanta Mohanty’s (b. 1994) practice engages deeply with architectural forms and their sociopolitical resonances. His works examine how structures function as carriers of memory, resilience, and conflict, embodying both histories and contemporary struggles. Drawing from his ancestral lands in Odisha, where questions of ownership, neglect, and encroachment frequently alter landscapes, Mohanty reflects on how built environments encapsulate stories of survival, displacement, and change.

His visual language is grounded in mapping, erasure, and reconstruction, combining lines, partitions of space, and overlapping visuals into evolving frameworks. Referencing film imagery, blueprints, and post-independence architectural styles, particularly brutalism, he situates architecture as a metaphor for the binary propositions of violence versus peace, truth versus falsehood, and resilience versus collapse. Through these engagements, Mohanty constructs an inquiry into space, time, and politics, using architecture as both metaphor and material. His works challenge viewers to reconsider the structures they inhabit not only as physical environments but as sites where historical, political, and personal narratives converge.

Mohanty earned his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Hyderabad (2019-2021) and his Bachelor of Visual Art from the Government College of Art & Crafts, Khallikote, Odisha (2013-2017). His work has been presented in exhibitions such as Feral Ecologies curated by Mario D’Souza (HH Art Space, Goa, 2024–25), Soup Boul (Vadodara, 2024), Places and Spaces (Vadodara, 2024), Trail (The Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, 2023), Abir First Take (Ahmedabad, 2021), and the International Mobile exhibition: The Flowers Will Start Flowering (Gallery OED, Kochi, and Bilbao, 2018–19).
Residencies have played a formative role in shaping his practice, including Shores of Serenity II at Dot Line Space Art Foundation, Chilika (2024); Space Studio, Vadodara (2022); and Sanna Art Residency, Hyderabad (2021). He was also a grantee for Elephant in the Room (2021), a project by the Conflictorium, Ahmedabad in collaboration with Stroom Den Haag, Hague, Netherlands.