Nature and the Cosmos - Observations from a Lapsed Art Lover

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. 

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.