“Living with a Wound is a commentary on the recent attacks on Mumbai which wounded India,” says Santhosh. “The basis for the show originated in 

a testimony I read from a Holocaust survivor which is used in the sculpture and can be read on the LED screen. The prisoner recalls being wounded 

with a blunt tool, and every time it was about to be healed the guard would reopen it. It’s a terrifying account of evil versus human survival. Whilst 

doing these works the bombs happened in Mumbai and the images I use have been appropriated from all over and refer to this notion of being under 

attack and being wounded. It’s like as soon as India begins to recover from one attack another one happens. It happens all over: we keep inflicting 

wounds on society. When it heals, another wound occurs.”

In one image, security guards are piling out of a truck as the bombs are going off. In another, a guard dog is shown close to an exploded car. And in 

a third a woman appears to be searching for a lost child amongst the rubble, an identity photograph in hand. But the work is neither reportage nor 

sensationalist in its treatment. In this new body of work, which features 5 large oils and a sculpture, Santhosh continues to use media related images

and photographs to explore themes of terrorism, injustice and war, drawing attention to the influence the media has on our perceptions of reality. 

Building on the success of his 2005 show with the gallery, this event follows the artist’s rise to fame during the last three years.

In his paintings, Santhosh reminds us of the “tinted glasses” through which the public sees topical events unfold by appropriating images from 

newspapers, magazines and news channels. His subjects - protestors, soldiers, injured civilians - are made to look like negatives in the tradition 

of Man Ray’s ‘Rayograms,’ with the viewer looking at the image almost as if through a thermographic camera or an x-ray machine. In this way, the 

artist creates a distance between the work itself and the actual event, disguising the parochial, and allowing local concerns to acquire a universal 

significance and thus wider response.