I fear, I believe, I desire

Akansha Rastogi visits the I fear, I believe, I desire show at the Gallery Espace, New Delhi and comes out with a feeling that most of the works in the exhibition send out a feeling of ‘perforated images’.

The ongoing exhibition at Gallery Espace, curated by Gayatri Sinha seems to have almost everything to make it a cutting-edge show – there are two video-based works, two installation-sculptures, drawings and paintings, and the digital photographic collages. Plus, the curatorial frame titled, ‘I fear, I believe, I desire’, directly invites subjective-versions of the participating artists.

It is a difficult show too. The experience that these artists and the show on the whole corresponds to is a set of little stories, and as the visual language and communication scale changes after every few inches, it becomes difficult for the viewers to grasp in totality, after being exposed to so many versions.

The curatorial essay in the catalogue discusses each exhibit in fine detail, and thus needs no elaboration over that again.  I propose to view the exhibition as the producer of perforated images. It certainly chooses mediums that are already well-placed in our everyday memory-scapes – the digital imaginary, introduced through television and camera, now formulates a significant part of our day-to-day visual assemblages, and determines contemporary aesthetic tableau. I am also interested in the ‘symbol-systems’ that these artists invent and its relationship with the subjective self of the artist.

I call the works as perforated images, for they have holes. They ‘model a reality’ that encourages slips, pass-throughs, sinks and even skin deep encrustations. The mode is confessional, thus ‘acknowledgement’ and easy acceptance of certain tropes informs the works. Relating this process of ‘acknowledgement’ and the artistic self is an immensely fruitful exercise, for it reveals insights. Like Sonia Khurana’s self-willed act of abandoning her body and the consciousness to the will of the birds that surround her, perch on her, treat her as part of the nature – all this occurring amidst the crowd of her own specie, i.e. human beings who have gathered to see the spectacle of a distraught body, is an acknowledgement of a race that capacitates itself for distancing. Distancing from ‘the other’. Distancing from anything and everything that is not like.

‘Acknowledgement’, I insist is the dominant node, and each artist’s visual language in the show is a procession towards a kind of acceptance. There is no struggle or antes, even if there are they have been rendered as tamed. And, this taming is very-very interesting. Avinash’s photo-montages speak of the irreconcilable connection between the unrecognizable form in the centre, and the frame consisting of recognizable everyday chores, sites that invoke and provoke normalcy-ity. This distorted form emanates from the body – the human body. The artist’s intentionality behind representing this abnormality is in harmony with the distortion and manipulation that the medium of expression itself facilitates. Moreover, the fact that it’s partaking of the artist’s own body complicates the case, making it in no way an easily consumable visual.

Anandjit Ray’s installation ‘Night Fountain’ and an ‘Untitled’ painting traverse the bed-time fantasies and fears. The installation employs a pattern made of taps plumbed together to form a grid of interlinked desires, fears and beliefs that coalesce on the surface-structure of a bed. It is a powerful symbol that Ray works with. Bed – the happy seat of domesticity is also the frustrated emblem for an adolescent – is a vulnerable site, a non-uniform structure.

Configuring with Ray’s grid is another installation-sculpture by Riyas Komu, evocatively titled as ‘Story Planters’. Styled in the manner of a toy-bullock-cart, a plough at one end, this wooden structure maps the plantation of urban spaces with multi-storey construction in one trolley and a television set in the other – the two symbols/ markers of Development and Urbanization. Gauri Gill in her photographs also traces the city in desolate states. Her explorations, I find, mismatching to the flavor of the exhibition on the whole. Ram Rahman’s collages, Rina Banerjee’s fancy microscopic bacteria associated with the disease and epidemic again relate an aspect of the urban, introduce the various approaches that merge, confuse and play, counter-play with each other. I like the show even more, as I refer and recall back and forth the perforated images.