A Tribute to “….for What has been lost”
at Travancore Gallery

Rashika Ojha reviews the recently concluded show
'A Compensation for What Has been Lost’ and says that here the spectators are guided by the curator’s vision.

The contemporary art scene is about multiplicity and the inherent flaw of multiplicity at all levels such as personal, historical and socio-political. The heightened multiplicity is prone to a breach or gaps and art becomes filler as compensation to the missed/lost. The art exhibition organized by the art curator JohnyML, brings a collection of such tributes paid to the lost at the Travancore Art Gallery.
 
In every era art has defined itself differently; originally it was magical or sacred, but it was also physical, later it was social in character but then in all these phases it was a preserve. Art was a preserve of the few not as a language but as a property. But the age of mechanical reproduction liberates art from its preserves and makes the images of art ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, and free. Therefore, they become more human as they come from the mainstream of life and become a language that surrounds every individual.

These floating images have empowered contemporary artists with a language more wide and versatile, enabling them to negotiate in present with the bygone eras and also to an extent with the vision of future. The marriage of such portrayal and vision can be seen beautifully in the exhibition “A Compensation for What has been lost”, brought together in collaboration with the e-magazine www.artconcerns.com. A group of twenty two artists together remunerate for what has been lost or forgotten. May that be the often ignored aspiring ones struggling to prove themselves, like Natasha Preenja’s Maya where she critiques captivity of the chosen beings and displays the silhouette of her beautiful Maya who is just a silhouette because she has no identity but is just an illusion as has no name/fame.
 
JohnyML explains the works as “an attempt to redefine and reconfigure the belief patterns in terms of art”. For example Josh P S in his untitled watercolour reflects on a belief pattern that life is to live and finally die to be liberated. Death is seen as salvation because life is not what we are blessed with but contrary to that we are cursed with.  In this piece Josh shows faceless people walking monotonously towards a common goal that is to achieve death and be liberated. Here, Josh reflects on life as compensation to the sins of the past. But this painting definitely establishes compensation as essential and inevitable.

Can we imagine Sri Sankaracharya and Sri Narayan Guru in conversation, no. But Manoj Vyloor brings them together in a “Difficult Dialogue”, building up ties with the multiple past and recreates history. This is to fill gaps between histories. Bridging the long prevailed gaps between different parts of our history is the biggest compensation for a country that has several strands that cannot be divorced but need to be seen in totality.
 
Representing the deprived and compensating for the ones who were stripped of their deserving rights is visualized through the paintings of Pradeep Mishra and Rajiba Lochan Pani. The skeletal hands reaching for a morcel in Rajiba Lochan Pani’s ‘Dry Run’, depicts the deprived classes of Orissa. The pierced tongue in a backdrop of green lands is very disturbing and also specifies the level of critique. Four calves stripped of their mother’s milk and instead just offered a part of it in a bowl in Pradeep Mishra’s ‘Fertile Soil’ refers to another level of deprival. The powerless calves shown in silent protest detest the bowl but unable to resist the available.

The eerie in Rajan M Krishnan’s ‘Meteorite’, engages with compensation at different levels whereas Cheeroth’s “Who Knows When It Will Rain III” deals with the subject by expressing anxiety, the dilemma in Pratul Dash’s “Once Again”, autobiographical overtones in Pushkin E.H ‘s ‘Waiting for the Postman since Saturday’, mythological undertones of Roy Thomas ‘Listening to the Silent Epics’, the chants of the ‘Buddha’ by MSC Satya Sai and many more. All of them interpret the subject differently and deal with it at different levels and here lies the vision of the curator which is holistic enough to accommodate the variety.
 
To sum up “The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act” said by Marcel Duchamp. The art experience is not limited to the artists but completes only after it is complemented by the spectator’s experience. This is to be highlighted in most of the curated exhibitions because here the level of experience is doubled because here a spectator is guided by the curator’s vision.