Two Saturday Mornings, Mostly Well Spent

It's been a promising few weeks for art in Bombay. The art world's equivalent of a rockstar making his debut in the city, a festival of photography, more shows previewing than I could keep count of and several populating the weekly must-do/must-see lists of lifestyle magazines. As always, there was more that I wish I had seen than I could actually make the time for.

A Photograph is Not an Opinion - Contemporary Photography by Women

Curated by Sunil Gupta and Veeranganakumari Solanki, featuring multiple artists

March 14th - 27th, Terrace Gallery (at Jehangir Art Gallery)

Many photographers, many concerns - disease and death, the environment, the body, the passage of time and meaning, a woman's right to physical autonomy in public spaces, the burdensof conflict and loss that women bear, longings and explorations, the constitution of family, socialization, repression and coming of age, desolation and its conceits. Some works were overtly feminist, some less so, some perhaps not at all. There was a lot to see and to process. Multiple themes jostled together and what one eventually got was a glimpse of an artist's work rather than an articulation of a narrative, process or aesthetic. Full marks for breadth and for bringing a few lesser-known names (to me, at least) into the spotlight. But none too many for depth.

A Village in Bengal

Chirodeep Chaudhari

March 14th - 26th, Project 88

I'd seen one of Chaudhari's photographs from this exhibition in my morning newspaper. It struck me enough to have me venture out in the afternoon sun to see the complete show. Anyone who's been in Bombay over the last few days will acknowledge that that's no mean feat for a badly reproduced photograph to accomplish.

Chaudhari's show consists exclusively of images of the Durga Pujo his extended family celebrates in their ancestral home in rural Bengal. Taken over a span of 12 years, the pictures are an attempt to capture his family's history as it evolves, takes on new forms and transforms completely. It is also a story of the photographer's own acquaintanceship with a place that is significant, but not, a place that is not quite home, but not quite away. If you visit, flip through the accompanying coffee table book - A Village in Bengal - and read the artist's essay, which describes his process much more eloquently and clearly than I have.

Looking at the show does feel a little bit like looking at a family album, but in the best possible way. Intimate without being intrusive, these images are vividly personal and particular but also instantly recognizable, each evoking a mood or a moment the viewer could have experienced in a completely different context. And they're beautiful - fine-grained and detailed in a way a lot of photography no longer seems to be. Ripples, creases, gestures and pauses are all captured with skill, deliberation and without mawkishness. Craft that doesn't crumble under the weight of concern might be old-fashioned, but it will always get my vote, and this show has plenty of it.

Anatomy of Silence

Rakhi Peswani

11th February - 9th March, Guild

I never know quite what to make of the Guild. I can't predict what I'm going to see - works that are angry and shrill, confusing, thought-through or simply well-intentioned. Rakhi Peswani's show checks the last three boxes, some more vigorously than others. It's an interesting idea - the exploration of the hand-made and its associations with art, myth or more appropriately in this country, labour. As a supposedly evolving consumption society, we exoticize and fetishize the hand-made but do not often enough investigate its origins in the repetitive and exploitative. What price do we - or does someone - pay for our crafts? The best works are those that bring light to bear on the unnoticed and unacknowledged 'handmade-ness' of the mundane - handkerchiefs, washcloths, mattresses. The least effective are the quotes embroidered on limply hanging sheets of gauze/ chiffon/ something ethereal.

Poems I Used To Know

William Kentridge

6th February - 20th March, Volte

What can I say about this show that hasn't already been said? Kentridge is much celebrated and lauded, and anyone who pretends to have even the most cursory interest in contemporary art has been hot-footing it to Volte over the past few weeks. The show has been heralded as a coup for the gallery and the city and for once, the heralds seem to have gotten it right.

I haven't seen enough of Kentridge's work or its staging to be able to compare this show with his other triumphs, but the art is indisputably interesting and good. I am not me, the horse is not mine is the centerpiece. Part collage, part film, part performance, part text, it's ultimately a work about the absurdity of disavowal and the conditions that make it necessary. What gestures and words does one employ to distance oneself from one's own gestures and words? It's ultimately a futile exercise but one that produces interesting and amusing theater when performed on a large enough scale.

There's enough and more to see and lots of technique on display - hand woven wool, ink and charcoal drawings on pages torn from the Oxford Universal Dictionary, sculpture, lithographs, smaller sets of films. I didn't expect to have fun, but I did, especially when watching 'No, IT IS' (2012), a triptych of flipbook films. I suppose it's because I really enjoy looking at sketches and pen and ink drawings, and Kentridge has a lightness and deftness of touch that I wasn't expecting.

So go, make sure you look at everything, and come away feeling that you've spent your time well.

Many Media, Some Notes

Sweet Unease by Ranbir Kaleka

Volte, Colaba

16^th December 2010 – 15^th February 2011

I’ve always had some difficulty engaging with trans-media art. Unlike the more traditional and conventional forms that I have grown accustomed to, works of this nature rarely come with the in-built cues that tell viewers what to watch out for, what to attend to, what to acknowledge. Trans-media art makes for a more immersive experience – viewers must contend with multiple streams of information and sensory stimuli, and arrive at a negotiated understanding of what they see, hear and sense. Viewing such art is a challenging and often unwieldy process – which is why it helps when the effort seems rewarding.

‘Sweet Unease’ Ranbir Kaleka’s first solo exhibition in Bombay, offers an introduction to some of the art he has been producing over the last decade. These trans-media works are simultaneously interesting and intricate, consisting of video, audio, pictures, and paintings overlaid on one another. Each work calls for a conscious engagement – whether it is ‘Cul-de-sac at Taxila’ (2010), a Murakami-esque juxtaposition of a man, a hammer and a horse; ‘The Kettle’ (2010), a riff on the many settings and scenes an everyday object can inhabit; or ‘He Was a Good Man’ (2008) a meditation on the inanity of an ordinary human life.

I approached these works looking for a hook or two that would allow me to access them in their entirety – a wasted effort, because I soon realized that there is no one element that holds them together. They are complex, and demand time and absorption. Eventually, I had to permit myself to experience the works in fragments and parts, and it was only through repeated viewings that I was able to derive some sense of the wholes. It seems to me that this lack of coherence is at least partly deliberately constructed. 

Kaleka superimposes the bizarre onto the ordinary, the almost-there onto the most-certain, and his works retain a slipperiness that evokes those moments in which we realize that things are not always what they seem, and that there are cracks beneath even the most solid surfaces. He forces us to grasp at images and meanings, and there is a palpable open-endedness to the viewing. There is an all too rare conjunction here between media and theme(s), and I wonder why we haven’t seen or heard more of him. 

Myth ↔ Reality: Constructing Cult-u’re - Group Show

The Guild, Colaba

4^th-30^th January, 2011

The name of the exhibition, the punctuation, the pun, all work together to assert that this is a show about the continuous making, re-making and un-making of myth, fact, belief and consequently, culture. We are invited to think of culture as mutable, as a dialogue rather than inheritance.

Such themes that lend themselves easily to multiple interpretations. Sutras scrawled on driftwood, the evanescence of reflections, the mysteries of the physical world in which a single substance can be liquid, solid and vaporous, the implications of the many meanings and pronunciations of a given name, the increasingly intimate connections between consumer choice and personal identity, the multiplicity of personal narratives – these are all legitimate, if not equally accomplished or sophisticated ways in which to address the constructs of self and permanency.

The works I found most interesting were Job Koelewijn’s ongoing reading project, in which the act of reading is endowed with physicality, transforming our experience of text. Renata Poljak’s videos and photographs spotlighted the intersection of costume, performance and nationality – perhaps the show’s only attempt to explore culture within an explicitly political framework. 

The show was relatable, accessible, earnest and honest, but I must admit it would have been interesting to see a little more conceptual complexity, and to have had the artists push their envelopes a bit further. Having known the curator, Veerangana Solanki, for some time now, I am aware that she attempts to seek out artists we don’t often see, and media we don’t attend to enough (along with everything else, two movies by Johan Grimonprez are screened at regular intervals). She’s succeeded on both those counts, although the show is fun, rather than exceptional.