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, 6^th September to 9^th 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, 10^th August – 10^th 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.