His earlier works tackle global issues of war and terrorism and its representation and manipulation by politics and the media.
Santhosh's sculptural installation "Houndingdown" was exhibited in Frank Cohen collection ‘Passage to India’.
His major shows include the following: "The work titled, Houndingdown is a key installation that broadly reflects my conceptual and linguistic concerns of my recent engagements.
It consists of thirty dogs and LED panels, is a combination of few historical references of ruthless and unforgivable deeds men committed in the past and relentless angst about the thoughts of future.
One of the references is a testimony, a text that runs across on three LED panels placed on the floor, of a schoolgirl who witnessed the Hiroshima nuclear explosion.
My reference here is to an experiment they conducted to see how long a man can continue to live, enduring the pain of a wound on his body.
The Nazis would make a cut on the hand with un- sterilised tools, then cover it for some days and then open it up again and again on a regular basis each times just before it is about to heal so as to keep it a living wound."
Effigies of Turbulent Yesterdays, 2011–2013 "The genre of the landscape can be understood, among other things, as a product of the encounter between the pastoral imagination and the aspirations of an emergent landed gentry, whose relationship to their property is often the ostensible subject matter of the paintings.
Its relative rarity is perhaps the result of generic conventions that tied it to an essentially commemorative purpose, but coupled with the fact that in the history of portraiture it is the powerful who have until recently had the privilege of being represented, one can see that it functioned almost exclusively in the service of ruling elite in establishing and extending their authority over their subjects.
In painting, the equestrian figure is also implicated in conquest, as he traverses a landscape that he metaphorically colonises or administers and which became (or was) his fiefdom, acquired and maintained more often than not through the exercise of illegitimate power.
In ‘Effigies of Turbulent Yesterdays’ we have a clash of different linguistic registers, with the powerful mimetic realism of the equestrian portrait meeting head on the schematised fountain of blood that springs from it, whose sources one can trace to miniature painting as well as comic book illustration.
If the King is the Head of the State, then a decapitated monument is both a ludicrous and pitiful spectacle, – an act of iconoclasm which, like all forms of subversion attempts not to destroy it, but to turn it into an inverted representation of itself, or in this case, into an anti-monument that lays bare the disavowed histories of violence that sustain it, and by extension all such iconographies of power.
This act of symbolic regicide thus exemplifies the truth of every iconoclastic gesture, – the recognition that every contestation of power starts with the destruction of the images through which its authority continues to be exercised and reproduced, – and thereby indicates the limits of sovereign power.- Sathyanand Mohan.