Premio Combat Prize

| €’Constructing Life’ | Artist’s Note |Our daily lives, living atmosphere and quality of life is not only signified by the physical buildings we inhabit but also speak about our tastes, culture and sophistication. Of our most serious endeavours in life is to create one such dwelling to exist and flourish in.It is a silent army of people who painstakingly go about laying down bricks and concrete to create this, our urban footprint.The sophisticated and design-minded buildings are visually so contrastingly different to the hard and weather-beaten appearances of the people who construct these structures for us. And yet there is such character in their form and faces.There is a certain way we were meant to be that has been doctored and cultivated to present to the world, a packaging of us that most of us wouldn’t recognize if we were all taken back to a stage of mere existence.It is these ideas that have taken root in my mind to create portraits of the construction worker in a series that would question our ideas of what ’interesting’ is.Shibu Arakkal....................................................................................................................................................................................................................| Shibu Arakkal | Two Decades of Photo Art |Shibu Arakkal is an award winning photo artist who has garnered international respect with his rooted, profound photographic art across a diverse range of works shown in over 50 shows spanning a career of 20 years. His works embrace abstraction, minimalism and Zen philosophy as well as fuse traditional techniques of printmaking with modern technology in a very unique, unconventional style. Every work articulates a depth of thought that resonates with the viewer; making one believe that the artist and his subject have found a way to converse through the medium of photography.Arakkal is one of the few Indians to have won the very prestigious ’Lorenzo il Magnifico’ Gold Prize in Digital Art for his work from ‘Constructing Life’ at the Florence Biennale 2013 in Italy. Arakkal also coined the term ‘iPhonography’ - the essence of experimentation and artistic expression using the iPhone and the photographic works as ‘iPhonographs’. His creation of photographic art using iPhonography is technologically experimental, even internationally, but still on the cutting edge of image creation and reproduction. He has the heart of a painter and the mind of a photographer; which is evident in his work, leaving the viewer to navigate the complex lines of the seen and the unseen. His works have found homes in private and institutional collections across India, China, Singapore, Australia, Italy and New York.Arakkal’s daughter Zarah is a driving force in his relentless desire to create a body of photographic art as a legacy. When he is not working, his passions are evangelizing the magic of analogue photography and indulging his love for motorcycles - be it riding, or designing an exclusive machine that will showcase his aesthetic mind.