• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Love on the Walls of Seedy Rooms

Anything that confines is a ‘frame/grid/room/cell’ and in these spaces violence is enacted on a daily basis in the name of domestic life, love is played out as a ritual, closest and toilets become escape routes. Gayatri Sinha’s curatorial venture at the Bodhi, Mumbai offers multiple possibilities for reading into social relationships, says Amrita Gupta Singh in this exquisite review.

Is the past a ghost that haunts the present, exiled yet always within reach? Or is it rather that the present constantly threatens to fall back toward the past, slipping into the shapes of histories, traumas and stories of habitation? Is our present which is full of repressive apparatuses force us to express our opinions and desires, only in the confines of a R.O.O.M? Rooms/Shelters as they are spread as stable, rectilinear geometries, also serve as psychic maps, where the experiences of the living body fuses with living space, as a junction of relationships, as emotional sign-posts in different moments of time. A room/cell could also turn into mini-theatres of insurrection or resurrection, as dialogic expressions of entrapments or liberty, love and death, belonging and alienation, in the vortex of the private and the public.

In an engagement with the ideas of territories /frames/ thresholds/ grids/ cells/ prisons/ sanctum, seven contemporary urban artists come together (Nalini Malani, Anita Dube, Surekha, Shilpa Gupta, Riyas Komu, Jagannath Panda and Sunil Gawde) responding to Rahul Mehrotra’s architectural design, in a show, titled, Frame/Grid/Room/Cell curated by Gayatri Sinha and presented by Bodhi Art, Mumbai. In a postmodernist amalgamation of architecture, design and art, of individual rooms/cells within the white cube (also brings in the outside architectural spaces of the city inside a gallery space), which are autonomous and interconnected, each artist creates symbolic objects of psychological and intellectual states that speak of love, desire, memory, labour, identity, media, surveillance, commodification, ecology, class and the ghastly existential conditions and cultural orders of the Third World.

In the lower level, at the entrance of the gallery, in a moving piece by Anita Dube, one encounters the word ‘LOVE’, cast in white wax, with wicks burning within each alphabet, and where the viewer can literally touch and feel and walk within, into and around the spaces of this term, in its monumental three-dimensionality. To consistently define love is a difficult task, and often a subject of much debate. In our dismembered times, this term assumes multiple meanings, and in this piece ‘love’ seems to move out of its subjective/abstract ramifications, objectified in its whiteness, burning within with regenerative and meditative power. One can almost feel that Dube has used her space, which has no walls, as a sanctum for LOVE, exploring the semiotic significations of this loaded term, and in a Derridian sense, “This love means an affirmative desire towards the Other, to respect the Other, to pay attention to the Other, not to destroy the otherness of the Other”. In the multiplicity of negations occurring in contemporary society, Dube’s piece is a re-affirmation of an affirmation.

In contrast to Dube’s meditative space, Sunil Gawde presents to us a sanitized space of love, with red- heart balloons found in popular culture spread listlessly on the floor or touching the ceiling, without any gravitational marker, pointing to the associations of heart/love as transportable merchandise.  Love becomes a commodity that can be sold via the operation of markets, via the glamour of the media, where all human contact is expendable, in a population of alienated automatons of a rapacious capitalism. Repetition of the balloons becomes a metaphor, alluding to mechanized gestures, even in the case of Love, in contemporary society.

Surekha creates a cell, a dark space of feminine labour within the confines of a kitchen. Multiple photographs of claustrophobic urban kitchens, piled with unwashed utensils interact with red roses, where all human presence is excluded. It is assumed to be natural for women to wash utensils, here Surekha brings in the politics of water and via the symbol of roses, she also subverts what Love would mean in this politics of household labour arrangements among co-habiting couples, and its implications in domestic discourses of gender equality. Opposite the photographs is a video installation, in the form of a triptych with fast-forwarded images of women kneading dough and producing food, in de-humanized robotic gestures. In the dialectical relationships between the kitchen, food and the insertion of the roses, Surekha forwards questions of how, despite a large number of women moving into the paid labour market, domestic labour involves both production and consumption and also has an emotional component/confinement, where women do double labour as an expression of care for their families and also to avoid conflict in relationships. The artist argues that housework produces gender through an everyday enactment of dominance and submission, questioning such ‘naturalized’ gendered behaviours in public discourse.

Walking up the stairs to the upper level of the gallery, Nalini Malani presents to us grid-like paintings from the ‘Stories Retold’ series, narratives from the Hindu scriptures Bhagavad Purana and tales from the Panchatantra, looking back at the oral traditions of India that developed in parallel to the classical written texts. Via story-telling, alternative interpretations proliferated across region, language and sect, challenging monoliths and types of reading of the authority. Here, Malani, brings in contemporary conflicts of ‘authentic’ culture and purism that fundamentalism and fascist forces extol, essentializing one against the other (Every Muslim is bearded, hence every Muslim is the enemy), and impositions of singularity and conformity on our pluralistic traditions.

The often fuzzy boundaries between public and private space in the 'surveillance age', includes questions about celebrity culture, tabloid journalism and viewership expectations. Shilpa Gupta plays with notions of voyeurism and the ‘gawking’ culture that manifests itself into the everyday private lives of celebrities in the recent reality show ‘Big Boss’ that was aired on Sony Television. The market for sensation and spectacle, ambivalence about privacy and an insatiable appetite to own these lives makes these set of photographs of the ‘Big Boss Series’ eerily uncomfortable for the viewer/voyeur, for he/she too is ensconced in a dark cell, peeping into the transparent glass pink (female) and blue (male) rooms, halls, kitchen allotted to these celebrities, in the performative trading of various emotions. Bereft of human-(e) presence, monitored by the cam-(era), these photographs posit notions of mutating spatial and psychic regulations, and how surveillance becomes an emotional event in this very internalization of control, no weapons are needed, an “inspecting gaze” (Foucault) is enough.

We enter into another dark cell, essaying ecological catastrophes by Jagannath Panda. In the Urban Age, trees wear industrially manufactured golden upholstery, bereft of green leaves, while a graspable planet, is also adorned with similar material. But on closer inspection the earth is filled by minute insect life, woven into the fabric. Industrialization has depleted natural resources without a thought to our manifold ecosystems. The artist imagines a world to be protected, articulating concerns about the fragility of our environment.
Riyas Komu imagines the Third World to be a toilet, forwarding a powerful critique of economic globalization and the increasing class differences between the privileged and the exploited. In the gallery space, this is the last room on the upper level, where one has to enter via a passage; At the beginning of the passage are two large photographs of make-shift toilets of the urban poor, on bamboo stilts standing on murky water. The curtain separating the cell/toilet from the passage is printed with the image of a youth from a slum, and we enter a space dominated by a monolithic sculptural installation of a human skull with a shattered nose in low relief, with the map of Asia spreading from its brains. With the media frenzy of positing Asia as the next economic giant, globalization only caters to the privileged few, while the laboring masses continue to be prisoned in dismal economic realities, exploited by the rich.

The toilet/prison of Riyas Komu stands directly above the ‘LOVE’ sanctum of Anita Dube in the lower level below. A sanctum and a toilet, a telling metaphor of our times; a commendable curatorial initiative and compelling narratives by the artists, my belief in art is resurrected.