Friday, September 10, 2010

Different Strokes



 I visited two very different exhibitions at two very different galleries yesterday. I spent too much time at one, and too little at the other. I’d been warned that this would happen, and that I’d regret it.
Galleryske for Gallery BMB, Gallery BMB, 6th September to 9th October


BMB is currently exhibiting five artists from Galleryske, Bangalore. Most of the works have been created specifically for this exhibition, and include a triptych, videos, prints, sculptures and an installation.

Tailor Mama by Srinivasa Prasad consists of photos taken when he traveled around his neighborhood sewing up clothes people brought to him. The original cycle, complete with attached sewing machine, spools of thread and scissors, is also on view. Two other photos document his attempt at intervening in the natural order of the seasons by constructing a nest in a barren tree during winter. While I like the idea of someone wandering around a locality offering to patch up clothes for free, I’m not sure what to make of the nest-construction gesture.

Zakkir Hussain’s triptych, called ‘No Title,’ is an attempt at spotlighting ‘…punished form…which has been mutilated repeatedly in the cultural arena of the dominant.’ The violence and brutality depicted here is immediately recognizable, but I failed to respond to the work in any significant way.

Navin Thomas’ video explores the after-life of junk. Avinash Veeraraghavan’s works decode and then re-construct the fragmented visuals of dreams. Dense and packed with details to create layers, the artist is at least partially successful in capturing what he describes as ‘the tangled quality of the dream story.’ Sakshi Gupta’s donkey and semi-embryonic bird are large, spooky, and surreal.

The problem (and yes, there is a problem), with this show is that while the works are probably interesting in and of themselves, they seem jumbled together here. There’s no continuity, no theme, not even enough context created for us to really appreciate where the artists are coming from. BMB hosted a successful exhibition of women artists earlier this year – in spite of that being a group show, there was enough of an overlapping of artistic concerns for there to be some coherence for the viewer. This time around, it just isn’t enough that all of the artists are associated with the same gallery in Bangalore.

Rivers of Blood by Paula Sengupta, Gallery Chemould, 10th August – 10th September


I visited this exhibition too late – just hours before it was on the verge of being dismantled. I walked in on a Power Point presentation being made by the artist, and could only see a few of the works. Most of what I have to say is based on hasty viewing and immediate impressions – but these were enough to tell me that I had missed an opportunity to engage with a very moving and resonant exhibition.

Sengupta’s show is dedicated to her family, who were displaced from (what was then) East Bengal in 1947. Decades later, she traveled to Bangladesh to re-trace, or perhaps, re-acquaint herself with what would have been her parents’ lives there. The works installed here are a by-product of that trip. They address issues of displacement, the idea of home, the loss of a way of a life, the power and fallibility of ‘return.’ These are complex themes, and Sengupta has done them justice.

Each installation is packed with nuance and story – a bed covered in a bedspread made out of her father’s school badges, also including a short video and a diary extract recounting her own experience of visiting the institution. Cabinets enclose kurtas, linens and pillows embroidered with folk-stories in the traditional mode, now lost. My favorite work immortalizes shukti (dried fish) which is the central cooking element in her father’s former village. There is a dining table; a table-cloth embroidered with local scenes, figures and words; elaborate menus that are decorated with a faux-applique, consisting of lists of ingredients and descriptions of local dishes; all overlaid by audio tracks describing each dish, its constituents, flavor and aroma. My sister very perceptively described this as the ‘unfolding’ of a meal – families at a restaurant looking through a menu, with the elders beginning to describe how things used to taste when they were made back home.

This painstaking layering is a monument to what happens when people lose their ‘place’ in the world – all the minutiae of smell, sound, taste, ingredients and locality are swept away. To ‘go back’ is to acknowledge the painful truth that the loss has been overwhelming, and is irrevocable.

This is the first of Sengupta’s shows that I have seen. Her lecture cum presentation indicated that she is very interested in families – their culture, their rituals, their narratives. She has mined the familial histories and dramas of her own ancestors and those of her husband’s for inspiration and material. She seems to enjoy working with ‘found objects,’ wrapping them one upon the other, layer upon telling layer, while also occasionally inviting her family to participate in ‘re-finding’ some of these objects.

Her approach seems to be interesting and thought-provoking, a genuine attempt at grappling with all that goes into making a ‘way of life.’ Rivers of Blood was an exhibition that demanded time. I am sorry to have missed it.  

Monday, September 6, 2010

Spaces, Places and Trajectories

Earlier this week, I participated in a short and informal discussion about how art is often the product of an interaction between multiple actors. Institutions such as museums, galleries, auction houses and workshops are not mere receptacles for art, or sites dedicated to its ‘display.’  They are active agents that are complicit in granting or denying artworks a measure of legitimacy, value and credibility. We concluded that the artist and the work are only a small part of a larger picture composed of the prevalent  zeitgeist,  political imperatives and personal proclivities.

The conversation brought to mind my own encounters with galleries in Bombay. Art galleries, and not museums, are where I have had my first  encounters with art – they are amongst the most accessible venues offering a quick overview of the city’s contemporary art practices.  While our museums are affordable and informative in their own right, one visits them to understand how things used to be, not to see how things are or might be in future.

I thought it would be interesting, for once, to look past the art and at the galleries instead. After all, these are spaces with their own legacies and histories. I have picked three well-known venues that I believe are tracing very different paths for themselves at the moment.

Decline: The Jehangir Art Gallery,  Kala Ghoda
Before a slew of private galleries and exhibition spaces began to mushroom around Bombay, the ‘Jehangir’  was where artists big and small, reputed and unknown, exhibited their works.  Jehangir has played host to just about anyone and everyone – Hussain, Ram Kumar, Bhupen Khakhar, John Fernandes, Milburn Cherian, Sudhir Patwardhan, Gujral, Paresh Maity, the lavishly mounted RPG shows curated by Harsh Goenka, student exhibitions, page-3 painters.  Artists waited years to show their works here – and viewers showed up week after week, confident in the knowledge that they would find something worthwhile to look at.  And the Jehangir was truly a ‘public’ art gallery – no entrance fees, no discreet doorways that made you wonder whether visitors, were, in fact welcome.  It was very easy to walk into a show, up to the artist, and ask questions. Believe me – my sister and I did this repeatedly, once asking Laxman Shreshtha silly things like – “Why is there a big patch of red on this canvas?”

While the  setting continues to remain low-key and no-frills, it seems as if almost everything else has changed.  It has been a long, long time since I have seen a memorable show here. The last time I visited, parts of the ground floor were littered with debris. The authorities are apparently renovating the structure, but I failed to see any significant changes.  To add insult to injury, the art on display was poorly executed and haphazardly selected.  A sorry state of affairs for what was once, indisputably, the city’s most important and prestigious art gallery.

Transformation: (erstwhile) Bodhi, Kala Ghoda
The space that Bodhi once occupied has had many avatars – restaurant, showroom, abandoned real estate. So it’s fitting that the contemporary art gallery was itself replaced by something ‘au courant’ – an Italian furniture design studio.

Bodhi imploded after the recession in 2008, but it was one of those galleries that had a tangible impact on the Indian art ‘circuit.’  Lavish launches, dizzying prices, the best artists, high quality and interesting work, international outposts – Bodhi was an ambitious, bold, and by some accounts, brash venture whose influence was out of all proportion to its short existence. I have seen some excellent shows here, and, like many others, I was disappointed when the gallery shut down.

When I passed by the space and saw that it was clearly functional once again, I was curious to see what was on offer. I found elegant and expensive Italian furniture, clearly targeted at consumers with a surplus of taste and income. What I liked most about the design studio was its use of the space itself – large windows, expanses of trees, roominess, interspersed with some interesting (and not so interesting) design. Neither an ideal, nor a preposterous successor to the previous occupant.

Re-invention: Coomaraswamy Hall, Kala Ghoda
Nestled in the grounds of what was once known as the Prince of Wales Museum, the Coomaraswamy Hall is named after the great scholar-curator Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy.  The hall abuts a quaint curator’s cottage – it has whitewashed walls, tall ceilings, old-school fans, and potted palms at the entrance. Call me fanciful, but everything about this space evokes a quieter, bygone era.

Evocations aside, the Coomaraswamy Hall is easily one of the more dynamic exhibition venues in the city. In the course of fairly infrequent visits here, I have been lucky enough to see Dutch still-life paintings, century old antiques, German photography, silk saris and Indian handicrafts. Most recently, the Hall exhibited Tarun Tahiliani’s collection of trousseau saris from the Delhi Couture Week. I was very keen to visit, not so much to see the saris themselves, but to see fashion in a museum – a promising juxtaposition that our curators and bureaucrats have long resisted.

The Coomaraswamy Hall is quiet, unassuming and indiscriminate – characteristics that are likely to keep it going strong for some time yet. It’s easy to find the unexpected (good or bad) over here. It is a space that is always re-inventing itself, perhaps unwittingly so. Which is why I like to go back every once in a while. 

Of Legacies, Tombstones and Bamboo



An uncharacteristic spurt of energy saw me visiting three galleries in Colaba last week. The way was long, the day was hot, but I remained undaunted. I went, I saw, I came away impressed. Both with myself, and with the shows.



K.G. Subramanyan, on view at Art Musings (2nd- 30th August, 2010)
The first stop was Art Musings, which offered a quick glimpse of K.G. Subramanyan’s paintings. The show consisted of just a handful of works – but the bright colours, bold lines and play on planes immediately put one in mind of (what is now) instantly recognizable, old-school Modernism. And while there were no catalogues or brochures available, the gallerist herself was warm, welcoming, and keen to talk about art and share her impressions of the artist. She was also nice enough to allow us to browse through her own collection of writings by, and on, K.G.


My acquaintance with K.G.’s influence on Indian art is very recent, which was a particularly compelling reason for me to view his work for myself. I recommend this show to anyone who is similarly inclined and equally uninformed – see a little, browse a little. I enjoyed the unexpected and friendly conversation, and it’s difficult to be anything but cheery in this compact, yellow-walled space. Go to get introduced to K.G. Subramanyan, and to whet your appetite for a closer and more revealing encounter.


Neha Choksi, on view at Project 88 (2nd – 28th August, 2010)
Intriguingly entitled ‘If Nothing Else, Just a Smile,’ Choski’s show is an enigmatic puzzle. Walking around the gallery, I felt like I had all the pieces at hand, but wasn’t quite sure about how they went together. Of course, it’s naïve and possibly even presumptuous to assume that artworks can be understood or interpreted in all their entirety, but it’s something most viewers (including myself) are guilty of attempting.


The show consisted of large format colour photographs of headstones and the nodes of amputated tree-limbs, all taken at a Los Angeles cemetery. Many photographs had smiling faces etched onto them. In addition to this, there were a few sculptures constituted of mattresses, tree stumps, flowers, as well as a video installation.


Cemeteries are, in and of themselves, interesting spaces – sites for mourning, grief, remembrance, poignancy, togetherness. But why make them the locus for a set of works?  In an interview with TimeOut Mumbai, the artist says – “The first thing that a child sees when it is born and the first response that it gets from the world would be its mother smiling at it. If you have to talk about the history of happiness, you have to start from there….I don’t want to look at the cemetery as a place of mourning. I am interested in celebrating loss…I hope the viewers recognize the sense of levity and fun the pictures have.”



A mother’s smile as a child’s first response from the world? The history of happiness? Celebrating loss? Levity and fun? It would be easier to subscribe to this explanation of the works if the smiles in question were benign and innocent. They aren’t – they are leering, and when multiple faces are crowded together, as in the case of ‘Fledglings’ – even ghoulish. The closer one goes to the photographs, the more it becomes apparent that the smiles have been created through deliberate acts of vandalism – etching, scratching, ripping, tearing. ‘There, you fixed it,’ consists of a torn and ripped photograph that is put together with tape, smiley face more-or-less in place.


This deliberate juxtaposition of happiness and brutality is disconcerting. I think of the smiling faces as a grasping defence against the finality of loss, expressed in a pre-fabricated and accessible format – a self-imposed return to innocence. Which is possibly why I found ‘Remembering Mummy,’ – styled as a child’s quick scrawl of what her mother must look like, set against the backdrop of a tombstone – incredibly sad.


Maybe there is some macabre humour here. But amidst the sagging mattresses, wilting flowers, and cemetery graffiti, I couldn’t bring myself to smile. There is something else going on – questions being asked – and even though I couldn’t fully articulate these undercurrents, it is important that I felt compelled to try.


Priyanka Choudhary, on view at Gallery Maskara (2nd-22nd August 2010)

The short introduction to this show says that the artist is interested in a ‘pubic’ anxiety, and without claiming to know exactly what she meant when she used that word, it’s fair to say that ‘From Nul to Now’ is a show infused with tension.


The most striking thing about the all works – small, large and very large – is their astonishing tactility. Choudhary eschews paints, preferring to use plaster, clay, twigs, thorns, bark and nails instead. Looking at the works, then, is not so much a matter of seeing as of ‘feeling.’ It is a process of imagining and reacting to the texture of the work, of wondering how it would feel to touch them and hold them.


So at one level, the tension I speak of is a textural tension, born of the interplay of materials – canvasses that are slashed or studded, bark wrapped in muslin and embedded with nails. And the works have a beauty and delicacy which belies the coarseness of their constituent elements. My favourites include 2 long, twisted branches that are covered with an intricate arrangement of nails that immediately brings embroidery work to mind, and a set of 3 small baby-pink and white canvasses, two of which resemble little tissue covered sacs of nails.



And then there is a massive wood sculpture, entitled ‘Pubic,’ that looms over the gallery. Composed entirely of scaffolding-quality bamboo tied together with rope and the occasional plaster smear, it resembles nothing so much as an explosion in abeyance. This is a work with a palpable presence, and the tension one experiences with it is that of approach. How close does one go? Will it really stay intact? What if one of those pieces was to come undone and propel to the floor? It has been a long time since I have reacted to art viscerally, and it was nice to be reminded that under certain circumstances, I could. Another work that has a sense of its own space is a pockmarked canvas protruded by a fragile dry thorn bush. The canvas is deceptively ‘normal’ sized, until one realizes that one has to walk around it, rather than up to it. To go too close is to risk damage – not to oneself as much as the thorns.


So there is tension here, if not full-blown anxiety. And I will be going back to experience it all over again.