• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Handle with Care

Janakiram visits ‘Handle with Care’, a solo exhibition by Ashish Kumar Das and feels that the artist expresses the insecurities of a migrant in urban space.

For an urban migrant, the surroundings look either kaleidoscopically beautiful or menacingly fragmented. Each day appears before them as a new puzzle with shifting allurements and terror. However familiar a migrant with the space in which he adapts to himself, the presence of the governing agencies keeps thwarting his sense of sensibility. Occupancy in a permanent address or accustoming oneself with the new situations by adopting the vernacular language, fashion and mode of living might not assure the safety levels as the notion of migration itself remains as a problem to be addressed and solved.

Though it is a general case, artists who migrate to urban spaces articulate this fear of negotiations in visual terms and all over the world the artists express their sense of insecurity in urban spaces using available modes of expression, whether it is traditional painting and sculpting or it be super technology based devices. The negotiation with the newer spaces happens basically through recalling the memories, finding metaphors and sample evidences from history. They deal with the fragility of life and place it in contrast with the menacing presence of the hegemonic ideologies that rule over the place.

The title of Ashish Kumar Das’s solo show ‘Handle with Care’ at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, itself heralds the fear of the individual migrant in urban spaces. Predominantly fragile images fill in the canvases, foreboding an imminent collapse. The downcast eyes of the human beings depicted and their stooping shoulders even at the most celebratory moments in their lives exemplify the loneliness that the migrants feel in an alien society. The works of Ashish cannot be termed as purely existential as they do not implode all what is felt but explode and try to engage the viewer with the urban realities reflected on the facades of wealth and affluence.

Most of the works that we encounter in Ashish’s show have images reflected on glass surfaces, containers and doors. There is a deliberate attempt on the artist’s part to split the painterly surface into fragments, perhaps neatly divided compartments so that a continuity/security of seeing is disrupted. A glass door of a high tech bus that carries some advertisement image of a couple in kissing ecstasy, on the one hand gives a sense of visual pleasure imparted through public voyeurism and on the other hand shows an imminent separation. The moment the door is opened the sense of happiness is divided.

Ashish, like any other migrant artist in Mumbai tries to keep his sense of security through referring to the images of nostalgia. Here again, he paints them in the glass jars. They have become memorial objects, dated and fragile. The album picture of a couple posing for a studio photographer, a serene scenery of a rural landscape etc are seen inside glass containers. Some are deliberately tilted images. The precariousness is palpable in this.

For any migrant, life becomes tolerable only when the reality is filtered through the meshes of metaphors. Golden fishes in a fish tank, in this sense become a handy metaphor for Ashish. Even the temporariness of familial bliss is translated into a teddy bear kept in a glass jar. However, the life threatening factors are not overlooked in these paintings. There is a cat ferociously ogling at the golden fishes from the other side of the jar and there are human shadows darkly hovering over a set of drawers, one of which contains a bird’s nest and egg. The metaphorical indulgence of the artist is too obvious when he paints a heart with dynamic strokes only to transform it later into a skeletal camera. Similarly he paints a self portrait which slowly turns into a ticking clock. This metaphoric indulgence looks a bit outdated and inconsistency seen in some of the works is a minus point as far as the show as a whole is concerned.