The Corporeal Receptacle: Art Review

In her catalogue essay for the group show Body as Vessel, from the 3rd to the 30th of April, at Art Alive Gallery, New Delhi, curator Geeti Sen suggested that while contemporary global trends might seem to push for a fragmented, insecure image of the human body, art in India could still draw upon a traditional understanding of the body as both a sacred geography in itself and a microcosm of the universe.

Nevertheless, only Shambhavi Singh’s work seemed to specifically engage with this legacy; her paintings entitled Earth, Wind, Water, Fire and Sky use kajal, neel and acrylic to suggest planets in the universe as well as the earthen pot, which in Kabir’s poetry often represents the human body.

Puneet Kaushik’s installations graphically evoked the female body by referencing the vagina, and Mithu Sen’s paintings too broke the body down: bones emerged from feet, gullets turned into intestines. Here was the body as machine, its many parts carrying on a quasi-industrial process.

Works by Anupam Sud and Gogi Saroj Pal both concerned themselves with the gendered body. Sud’s etching Between Vows and Words continued her exploration of the man-woman relationship; like in Dialogue (1984), the male and female figures seemed simultaneously entwined and separated – by a wall of words. In Persona a female figure held up a featureless mask; the same gesture was repeated powerfully in The Laundry, where a woman pegged 'clothes' (that looked like her own skin) on a clothes line: her possible selves were hung out to dry. Pal’s Natti Binodini series (I-V) featured female forms as fluid limp as Sud’s were sculpted and muscular, bending and curving into unnatural positions as if to fit into the frame. Pal’s dreamy-eyed, red-lipped women, the flowers from their saris leaching into the background, reminded one – ironically – of classic Tagore heroines – respectable, domestic middle class women of the kind that Binodini always wanted to portray but was not allowed to.

An edited version of this was published in Art India: The Art News Magazine of India (Vol XVI, Issue 1, Quarter 1, 2009).

Illuminating Detail: Indrapramit Roy's paintings

Indrapramit Roy, Metropolis I, 30” x 40”, Watercolours on Golden Acrylic base on paper
(Image courtesy India Uncut)

Indrapramit Roy’s exhibition of new works at Anant Art Gallery, New Delhi, titled, …And the Silence Drops Down, from the 13th of March to the 3rd of April, provided for pleasant but not very interesting viewing. Roy’s brushwork was accomplished and some of his watercolours had an appealingly underplayed quality. However, works like The Old Cupboard fell back on an unreconstructed nostalgia: a bedraggled teddy bear suspended from a mouldy shelf was expected to elicit a sentimental response. Works like The Mall and Décor aimed to be surreal but remained merely descriptive. The attempt at playfulness in Skyline, where bathroom toiletries were lined up to suggest the forms of city skyscrapers, fell flat.

But Roy’s depictions of water, skies and cities were skilful and often arresting. Anchorage and Pleasure Boat both showed boats at sea, the latter managing to convey a Diwali-like sense of festivity while creating an undercurrent of eeriness with the boat’s fishlike mouth and body outlined with fairy lights against a dark sea. More unusual were The Pool – I and The Pool – II, where a shimmering swimming pool was rendered through a skilled depiction of light.

It is usual for watercolourists to be fascinated by light, and Roy is no exception. His intriguingly empty, geometric cityscapes are often rendered at dawn or dusk, when the light has a special translucent quality. This was evident in Desert Morning, Dawn Breaking and Green Dawn. In fact, one could see Roy’s abiding interest in artificial light – rows of halogen lamps on a factory ceiling and hotel lights reflected in a swimming pool, for example. The Factory startlingly juxtaposed artificial light with a twilight sky, somehow making the natural light appear harsher.

TRISHA GUPTA

This review was published in Art India: The Art News magazine of India (Vol XVI, Issue 1, Quarter 1, 2009).

Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair: Art Review

Archana Hande’s critique of beauty myths and packaged urban spaces captivates Trisha Gupta. (Please click on the link below for images)

Archana Hande’s All is Fair in Magic White at Nature Morte Annex, New Delhi, from February 26th to March 21st, was a quirky, tongue-in-cheek interweaving of several seemingly unconnected issues – urbanization, history and its erasure on the one hand and class, race and notions of beauty on the other.

A large part of the exhibition comprised framed pictures made by block-printing on fabric, although there were some painted scrolls attached to wooden dowels and an animation video which drew on the pictures and scrolls for its characters and scenario. What worked well was Hande’s choice of pictorial style. The self-created block-print motifs, repeated and combined in different ways, enhanced the vivid fable-like quality of the works.

But despite its winsome storytelling and videogame heroines, All is Fair provided no happy endings. The narrative of the whole show hinged on three superwomen-like figures – industrialists’ wives from South Bombay (the accompanying text told us) – who decide Dharavi is “THE cause to pursue”. They skim over the city’s surface, arriving at a Dharavi all mapped and ready to receive their interventions, its various industries highlighted as if in a school project: embroidery, leather work, pottery. They encounter a businessman called Ali, who refuses their offers of assistance, and poses this riddle instead: “When I was poor my daughter was born black, and when I became rich, my second daughter was born fair. Why so? Is there a relationship between class and race?” In response, the superwomen design a fairness product called Magic White.

Hande satirised the contemporary moment, making unexpected connections between our ‘clean city’ dreams and obsession with fairness. The ‘whitening’ agent linked these post-colonial fantasies in what was a closely observed theatre of the absurd. In the video, as Ali recounts his “bestselling autobiography”, he stands legs akimbo, the shadows of his past selves massed behind him like henchmen. His two daughters appear on a seesaw – fair stacked against dark. Jewel-like skyscrapers rise into a turquoise sky, their new-fangled globalised luxuriousness unmistakably echoing the Mughal minarets next door.

From CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) to SMS voting, all was grist to Hande’s mill. And yet her vision stretched beyond merely critiquing the contemporary. In one triptych, the first picture showed a flock of birds flying over an ancient swamp, across which strode a single Harappan seal bull. In the second picture, the sky contained a solitary bird, and the ground was covered with ‘houses’, their roof-like shapes belied by that blue we know to be plastic sheeting. In the third, the bird was gone. An aeroplane flew over a terrain dotted with multi-storeyed tower blocks, their geometric regularity interrupted only by more geometric trees. Hande’s truth-telling, thankfully, did not preclude humour, and in the case of the works here, a strange, unsettling beauty as well.

Published in Art India: The Art News Magazine of India (Vol XVI, Issue 1, Quarter 1, 2009)