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Lacuna in Testimony:
Credentials yet to be proved
In this exquisite review, Divia Patel, curator, Asian Department, Victoria and Albert Musuem, London, analyses the photographs and videos presented in 'India, Public place/private spaces: Contemporary Photography and Video Art ', a show curated by Gayatri Sinha and Paul Sternberger at the Newark Museum. To find a niche in international art scene, the Indian photography and video artists should produce quality works, Patel says.
‘Lacuna in Testimony’ by Navjot Altaf offers a brilliant opening to a new exhibition at the Newark Art Gallery. This is the first major exhibition of Indian photography and video art to take place in North America.
On display are works by some of the most important names in this field alongside some emerging talent. It is an uneven show - with obvious strengths in documentary photography - and weaknesses elsewhere, but this is not surprising given that there is no formal teaching of fine art photography or video art in India. This is a field which has recently enjoyed some international exposure at Lille, Les Recontres D’Arles, and Photo London, yet the fact that there is little real knowledge of the majority of these artists beyond their national boundaries makes exhibitions such as this a necessity. Many of these works are culturally specific and require the national context of this exhibition structure to be fully appreciated, but there are also a few that translate well across cultures.
In ‘Lacuna in Testimony’ we have just such a piece. Here is a video installation that is thought provoking and hauntingly beautiful, a piece in which political comment does not eclipse the aesthetic. It consists of a wall of three large video screens onto which a film of the ocean is projected. Superimposed onto this background is a grid of fragmentary photographs depicting human atrocities that took place during the Gujarat riots of 2002. As the images are made to appear and disappear one by one, in time to the force of the sea, they are reflected in 72 small square mirrors arranged in a similar grid format on the floor directly below. Though born of a specific time and place, the simplicity and abstraction of the piece enables it to communicate cross-culturally with the minimum of explanation. It speaks not only of Gujarat but of global conflict, the movement of the ocean is the ebb and flow of world’s conflicts, never ending, constant, rhythmic and mesmerising, until the end when the ocean turns blood red before flowing clear once again. Working on many levels, the cultural reading of this piece as sited in the exhibition catalogue likens the sea to the great flood of the Indian mythic imagination, cleansing and healing as it washes the blood away 1.
The exhibition is split into sections: Street photography and social imperative; The collision of public and private; Playing inside: Photography, video and personal identity and Where is the border? The Diasporic Experience. This is a useful and studied navigation tool though many of the photographs would fit into more than one of the categories. Altaf’s piece is situated in the first section along with photographs of Raghu Rai and Raghubir Singh, Manish Swarup and others. This juxtaposition with documentary photography that seeks to record the visual truth, draws attention to the underlying meaning of her work which ‘questions the ability to document and understand through historical record’ 2. Entitled ‘Street photography’ it is with this section, which encompasses documentary photography in its many modes, that the curators of the show must have had one of their hardest tasks. As the most popular form of photography in India it is difficult to select from such a large mass of work, not least from the extensive collection of Rai himself. It would have been all to easy to fall for the seductive luscious colour images of Rai’s more recent panoramic views, as seen in Arles, but in this instance his B&W images of Indira Gandhi are used to place the audience at the historical starting point of this exhibition – the 1980s - and to steer away from the clichéd colourful exoticism and ‘timelessness’ that is the general perception of India. A consequence of this process however, and the limitations of the exhibition space and installation design make this section lack impact.
The works of Ravi Agrawal, Rajesh Vora and Samar and Vijay Jodha fit into what TJ Demos in his appraisal of contemporary photography calls the ‘reinvention of documentary photography’ 3. Like David Goldblatt’s depiction of everyday life in South Africa and Liu Zhenh’s images of China, they ‘use the camera to expose and validate the diverse conditions of everyday life that normally go unrepresented in mainstream media’.
Thus we see Agrawal’s images of the holy river Yumna and the life around it’s margins; the detritus that has accumulated and been neglected over time. In Vora’s photographs we are presented with the scenes behind India’s beauty pageants and in the insightful and engaging series ‘Through the looking glass’ by the Jodha brothers, we have a group of images which capture that most ubiquitous symbol of modern life – the television set - within the homes of their owners. Here we see inside a farmhouse and fisherman’s hut, a film director’s bedroom and the grand marble foyer of a TV company. In the ‘Farmer’s home’ the small red TV set sits on an old wooden table next to the batteries that power it. It is surrounded by brass lotas, boxes, oil cans and piles of clothing and bedding that hang from the ceiling. For the artists ‘these images record an object in a physical setting that can offer an insight into the changing values and lifestyles of India’s diverse population’ 4.
Beyond the documentary are the photographs and videos that invite the viewer into their constructed narratives. In the well-known tableau-vivant photographs of the ‘Phantom Lady’ and the more recent ‘Navarasa Suite’ by Pushpamala N. we have a series which is heavily coded with costume, lighting and props and relies on the viewer’s memory of classic Indian cinematic stereotypes. The key to their meaning relies on cultural knowledge. Also in this narrative mode are Tejal Shah’s ‘The barge she sat in…’ and the digitally manipulated ‘Re-take of Amrita’ by Vivan Sundaram, although the sexual coding in Shah’s piece enables a much broader reading.
Atul Bhalla’s ‘ I was not waving but drowning II’ offers a contemplative ocular experience within the ‘personal identity’ category. A series in which the first photograph starts with Bhalla’s body immersed in the sea and just his head rising above the water. The 13 subsequent images record the precise and gradual immersion of his head. The rhythmic calm of the piece and the reflective thoughts it initiates underlies the fact that this is just one part of a body of work which explores his engagement with, and desire to understand water.
The collection of video art that is interspersed through all the exhibition sections is evidence of the current popularity of the medium in India. There is however a tendency to favour the concept over the image leading to a piece of film that is rarely visually stimulating or otherwise engaging. Where for example is the sharp clarity, visual beauty and simple but poignant narratives that are seen in films such as ‘Saphir’ 2006, by Zenib Sedira or Zarina Bhimji’s ‘Out of the Blue’ 2002? Those that succeed in this exhibition are marked by their simplicity such as Sonia Khurana’s ‘Head-hand’ and Subodh Gupta’s ‘Pure’. Those that have been included in the documentary section convey their message, but Surekha’s ‘The tree woman’ is somewhat spoilt by the messy English subtitles which interfere with the image.
The strength of Public Places/private spaces is in the range of work on show. As it’s advertising states – it is ‘comprised of over 100 works that reflect the interior and exterior realities of today’s India’. There is much to be gained from this exhibition but there is also a need for a few more outstanding pieces to make it shine and a need for a less fragmented installation space. The catalogue provides a greater understanding of the exhibition and will have a useful legacy beyond it as the two essays by the curators Gayatri Sinha and Paul Sternberger examine the cultural context of the work as well as a much needed charting of the varied approaches and trajectories the artists have taken with these media.
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