MIND GAMES

“It is my ability to connect two unrelated things and make sense out of them that makes me inclined towards interactive art,” says the 46-year-old. The Mumbai-based artist has discarded the traditional canvas in favour of various media,from fiberglass to sweaters to old photographs to mirrors.

Yadav,who’s worked with several advertising agencies like Bates and Mudra,is currently the Group

Creative Director at Lowe-Lintas. He first got interested in interactive art after reading an interview of Damien Hirst. In 2006,he had his first solo show called ‘Labour’ at Museum Gallery. His second solo show was titled ‘Pavlov’s God’ and was named after an installation that showed the Pavlovian response of a man searching for his phone at the ringing of a bell—a metaphor for the automated world that conditions us to respond in certain formulaic patterns.

The genesis of ‘Memory Minus Me’ lay in something Yadav started doing seven years ago: collecting musty,discarded photographs from the 1930s to the ’70s from raddi shops—a father carrying his children on his back,the harsh planes of a street urchin’s face,a British family holidaying in India. “These photographs were perhaps the only evidence of a moment in somebody’s life,” says Yadav.

While most of the installations use a poetic language,the one that might pose a threat to your equanimity is that of a resin fetus getting baked in a toaster inspired by a painting of a pipe by Rene Magritte. “The fear that the installation imparts is not real fear. It’s only a representation of fear,” says Yadav,who’s accordingly titled the installation Ceci n’est pas une peur.