We stand before floor mats and banana leaves arrayed with a colourful, traditional meal; no trace of the guests, just the imprints of their feet, and the traces of their fingers worked into the food, which gradually disappears from leaf to leaf.
Leftlovers is a presentation of an Indian banquet, inspired by the plates of plastic food lining the display windows of restaurants in Japanese cities. The installation features hundreds of seemingly identical components, in an extended, infinite curve. Abandoned in a corner, a single leaf, almost bare of food, is placed in front of a terrestrial globe.
As the focal point of this multiple vision, the support and pretext for this encounter between India and Japan, the banana leaf also represents the individual stages of the creative process, the artist's palette. "Space, beauty, culture, hunger, choice, history, future, identity, taste": words scrawled on sketches placed beside each item of food reveal the hidden nature of this banquet, N. S. Harsha's worldview in miniature. An infinite, fragmented world whose disparate elements collide, answer one another, intersect and finally come together as one.
The Foundation has produced this exhibition – part narrative panorama, part social manifesto – for the Midosuji Gallery in Osaka.
