Is it just me, or are there more shows on in Bombay right now than one can possibly hope to keep up with? The last few weekends seem to have slipped right past me, taking with them a host of shows that I was very keen to see - Manjunath Kamath at Sakshi, young curators at Art Loft, Iranian art at the Guild, Zuleikha Chaudhari at Project 88 and Maya Burman at Art Musings.
There's probably a lesson in there somewhere. Maybe what the art lover needs is an iron will, the ability to resist the temptation to eat, nap, shop and watch movies in a quest to see every exhibition in town. It is safe to say that I lack this strength of character, and that I remain undecided about whether it must be cultivated.
Nostalgia, Pride and Fear
Gallery BMB, Fort
9th March - 9th April 2011
I remember visiting 'Nostalgia, Pride and Fear,' at the BMB early last month. An exploration of humanity's relationship with nature and science, the gallery brought together a diverse group of artists working with different media, but addressing similar concerns. Alison Kundla's petri-dishes and oxygen cultivating devices highlighted the somewhat hazy distinctions between what we define as 'natural' and 'artificial.' What happens to these definitions when natural processes are replicated and re-enacted in laboratories? Is the end product - pure oxygen, in this case - natural? Tatiana Musi, from Mexico, questioned our common definition of a 'garden.' Is it something we co-create with nature or is it an imposition and intervention of sorts? Is a garden necessarily beautiful and orderly? Can paintings of nature and scenery constitute an attempt to create a garden?
The other works - Ratna Gupta's latex moulds of tree barks, Teresa Gruber's tree portraits, and Soazic Guezzenec's insect/human collages - didn't strike me as being particularly compelling. It probably didn't help that the works seemed to have been exhibited without much thought or effort. I had to 'find' some of the smaller pieces for myself, and the nook right at the back of the gallery had been clumsily closed off.
BMB makes a habit of hosting a number of exhibitions- most of which run for a month or 3 weeks. I like the fact that there is something new and fresh to look at whenever I visit. But I've said it before, and I will say it again - their shows are uneven, and it wouldn't hurt for them to be put together with a little more finesse.
Jitish Kallat - Stations of a Pause
Chemould Prescott Road
March 22nd - May 21st, 2011
Everyone's been talking about this show - particularly a massive, 750 part work entitled 'Epilogue.' In Epilogue, Kallat charts the course of his late father's life by depicting all the moons he witnessed during his 63 years. The moons, and their waxing and waning, are represented by photos of partially eaten (or intact) rotis - the essential component of an everyday Indian meal. It's easy to speculate on the significance of the rotis as moons - do they represent fullness, emptiness, cycles of life, the unvarying nature of basic human needs? Kallat himself has articulated the conjunction of the cosmic and the microscopic in this work - we can use the moons to locate ourselves and our chronologies, and the rotis, unsurprisingly, symbolize a pan-Indian mode of sustenance.
As I walked through Epilogue, however, I was reminded of nothing so much as filing cabinets of the old-school Godrej variety that one still sees in government offices. Much like a mottled file in a cardboard folder, Epilogue records the details of a single human life using a handy metric. It's a little disconcerting to think that no matter how unique and rich our personal histories seem to be, the minutiae of human existence remain universal and even banal and can be boiled down to an average of three meals a day, a new moon and a full moon every month.
There are also a number of paintings depicting men at Bombay's train stations - looking expectant, patient, resigned; their belongings packed into small duffel bags; their hair tousled into strange shapes that on closer examination reveal themselves to be parts of the city's landscape. These men are waiting, always waiting, and it looks like the city - including its paan stains and socio-economic fault-lines - has infiltrated their beings, if not their dreams. I particularly like the gilded gargoyle heads that crown each painting - a nice, gothic, Bombay University inspired touch.
The video 'Universal Trail of a Grand Banquet' ostensibly depicts galaxies, universes, large cosmic bodies. What we are really looking at, however, are microscopic x-rays of everyday food items - another juxtaposition of the cosmic and the microscopic. I must confess, though, that I watched this video (also described as an immersive experience) 3 times over, and failed to grasp its significance. Sometimes what the viewer really needs is just an explanation.
Kallat's interviews reveal that he has taken on large themes with this show - the cosmic, the microscopic, birth, death, life, time. He is a quality artist, and his works are, without a doubt, competent and interesting. I wasn't moved by anything I saw, but that may be a function of the concerns he has chosen to address - it's not easy to translate the cosmic into something personal and felt. Epilogue does it best.
