Voices from the exurbias
Indian suburban life is going through a transition phase and these conditions are passing very fast. The new media, casual business, street market, bazaar culture and expanding transport system are diminishing the gap between different communities and societies, says Surya Singh while review the ‘(Sub)Urban Texts’, a group show of four artists at Gallery Espace, Delhi.
“City exists as a series of doubles; it has an official and hidden cultures, it is a real place and a site of imagination. Its elaborate network of street, housing, public building, transport systems, parks and shops is paralleled by a complex attitude, habits, customs, expectancies, and hopes that reside in us as urban subjects. We discover that urban reality is not single but multiple inside the city there is always an official city.” -Ian Chambers “Popular culture: the metropolitan experience.”
Roaming in Manchester during the spring of 1844 Friedrich Engels came across a very common experience about any city of that time that he discussed next year in his account, “The condition of working class in England” and discerned a relationship among political inventions, social realities and buildings-
“The town itself peculiarly built, so that some one can live in it and travel into it and out of it daily without ever coming into contact with a working-class quarter or even with workers so long, that it to say, as one confines himself to his business affairs or to strolling about for pleasure. This comes about mainly in the circumstances that through as unconscious, explicit intention the working class districts are most sharply separated from the part of the city reserved for middle class…”
It was the early phase of industrialization then transportation was not so rich, but today those quarters and slums within the locus of city has been demolished and pushed out of central peripheries of cities and have been developed as suburbs. In Indian contexts, last decade specially have transformed our cities in a shock-like waves- large scale migration towards urban regions, spatial expansion of housing complexes, and very visible houseless people on the streets. It was the age of new globalization, of unending flow of commodities and of large scale demolitions, planned terror and no entry zones. Considering suburban in urban population we will cross, very soon, the population of rural population. These very elemental forces of our urban experiences have been tacitly acknowledged by the four artists- Indrajit Prasad, Madhao Imartey, Sudarshan Gupta, and Sukhjeet- under the title “[Sub]urban texts”, an ongoing show organized by Gallery Espace in New Delhi. Three of these artists come from suburban Mumbai – the cultural hub of India with large scale violence, despair, and frequent flood due to mismanaged sewage system. If we figure out the 2001 India Census, 2.5 million people live in Thana and Kalyan two suburbs of greater Mumbai, but the figure will be something high if we include the floating population. The fourth one comes from Jammu with severed hand reaching towards heart.
Altogether different with their subject and compositions these artists have a common experience of fear and alienation which they explore through the chaotic impression of urban life. If Indrajit creates unpleasant images of life and belongings in gray background/areas, Sudarshan explores highly alienated human life within hugely constructed and monumental zones. Madhao Imartey, at one hand, is provoked by allergic reaction of shock, terror and confusing city life, on the other, Sukhjeet deals with growth and decay of organic formations that arouse the fear of loss.
Sudarsan Gupta explicitly visualizes the solitary life of urban site under construction. Like Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, “to be or not to be…” Sudarshan’s protagonist is all alone among thousand of chairs and bicycles, and seems speaking to himself. These are the places of public gathering, where people gather on occasions and go to their usual destination. But Sudarshan is going nowhere. His still life is indicated by sleepers resting beside. Here, he refracts the alienation of a humanity severed from its very ontological status. The relation exists no longer between human beings. Karl Marx defines this social sphere by “commodity fetishism” in which there is only a social relation between products. He argues that man’s “expression of life is his alienation of life, and that his realization of loss of reality an alien reality.”
If I follow the DH Lawrence famous dictum “never trust the teller trust the tale”, I will suspect the artist Madhao’s logic of investigation and his ability to displace and condense apparently contradictory symbolization in the same space and interrogate the analogy between natural language and signifying system. Indeed he is success to explore the confused reality of urban life. The uncertainty and homelessness arouse the fear and coldness in life. Terrified but placated, the terror of a certain space is a persisting issue of Imartey but he is in no condition to escape in spite of constant movement in his works.
Indrajit Prasad’s imageries directly indicate that we live in a world of second hand reality, Representation of representation, of simulacra. He produces the reality as such, not its imitation or representation. A much trained monkey, humanized sofa, plastic flowers near to real ones, birds picture in cage and a split table and hand pump. These all the pictures are set on grayish background. The gray effect directly indicates towards subdued urban life and its emotional tone as if some still from Ram Gopal Verma’s movie. Sukhjeet’s works are in ceramics and evokes the formal values of clay effect and its thematic expansion. His basic concerns are ephemeral life, temporality of any particular situation and dilemmas of existence. Organic formation of life is shown here in polished way.
Apart from all their creations indicating crisis of suburban life there is a hope of sustenance. Indian suburban life is going through a transition phase and these conditions are passing very fast. The new media, casual business, street market, bazaar culture and expanding transport system are diminishing the gap between different communities and societies.
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