Kochi, the art hub of Kerala witnessed the opening of a new gallery, Gallery OED on 17th August. The inaugural show ‘The Double’ curated by JohnyML is a welcoming change in the art scene of Kerala, says Kavitha Balakrishnan. She finds the show a bit image ridden but argues that the works present characteristically de-signing acts of the young minds from many locally shared premises of life.

‘Double’,  the inaugural show of Gallery OED Cochin, curated by Johny M L, is beamed with exciting images of stark undercurrents from a new generation in contemporary Indian Art.

It explores the theme ‘the other’, but not proposed as a conventional ‘problematic’ of duality.  It meets ‘the other’ not outside of the self, body and image. This is a translucent laser cut within the self, memory, wounds and body. So these slices of duplicating selves reveal a deep set turbulence and mutating skills of survival.

All the seventeen participants are up and coming artists of younger generation from different locales across the country. Each of them encountered the theme of the show with perceivable individual nuance. In another sense, it also happened the other way round. The curator being a close observer of the powerful back- end system of the new generation artists, he could grasp and closely well tune the show with the crux of their work. Anilkumar, one of the participating artists said, “I identified the concept-line in the curatorial note as already very much within the way I had been working.”

New tools have emerged to re-work on old idioms of imagination. Characteristic of all these works is the graphic scanning of inner structures through broken spaces or the glazed plasticity or a symbolic resistance through the duplicated but seemingly tamed ‘other- image within’. They are petrifying, awing and entertaining all at the same time.
Most fascinating feature of this show is its outright projection of an image-world. ‘the post-modern’  conditions of life has generated an image-rich field for communication. Today this fertile pitch is ploughed, rolled and finely prepared on and on for playful mutations.  Images are the ever-variable sites for convicted artistic acts for all these artists. They pounce on us. Not as ‘given’ category. It is also characteristically de-signing acts of the young minds from many locally shared premises of life.

Reji Arakkal deals with his own subjectivity as the son of a planter in Wayanadu district of Kerala. He addresses the very changed process of plantations today that favours attractively bigger size and shape of the product / fruit applying all possible extra fertilisers and hormones. Reji explores the visual possibilities of thoroughly localised images and gestures but places them in a contemporary context. With a sarcastic sense of the time, he finds out functional analogies of a new-age farmer with in his own process as an artist who tries to create much polished surfaces with ‘a few extra’ techniques. But he escapes the posh props of his own make in this drama through the properly anchored subject matter – the split – the cleavage – the doubling – of the fruits that easily evoke some local and gendered myths.

Sujith K.S is more explicit and sharply critical in his dealing with the image. He addresses the inner crisis of human civilisation that is at present hopelessly confident and uselessly hopeful. The submerged ‘animal’ in human disguise is sported in his works.

Anil kumar posits a strategically designed political satire in both his works. A hybrid visuality is made of the coexisting ‘miniature’ and the ‘gigantic’. He is also quite explicit in poise. There is a fantasy of bright hybrid objects, a watermelon or a fish or whatever, almost like totem objects of a consumer life, but at the same time showing all its inner mysteries and connecting threads in a graphical format. The changed agendas and broken image of political ideologies are imported easily. Suresh P also seems to face a disillusioned world of ideals with changed preoccupations and makes landscapes and projected designs with awkward and thorny images of nature. 

Anjaneyalu painted two canvases with two objects depicted on each, both having slanting shadows. Two hung objects. One is a kerosene lamp. Old fashioned equipment for light in the dark. The other is an old fashioned palm leaf- pouch. Both are hung on a white background. The canvases themselves made another slant shadow in the similar manner on the white walls of OED.  Anjaneyalu wrote in Telugu (and his friend translated) a reflective piece on his own art that subtly tells many things. “”….the death of privacy; and me. Like, it's all over and I am left with nothing but the pieces to pick up. ….Its all shadows though, but no whining on that. A screw driver here, a mobile charger there, nails on the floor, match sticks strewn all over: The discovery of the elements all over again.

Aruna Alancheri evokes a literally aligned canvas surface morphing it into a virtual world of digits and images. The world of new technologies is projected on to the image of a crouching woman in aruna’s work. And suddenly I remembered zeros+Ones’’, Sadie Plant’s provocative work on the relation between women and machines, the age of computing in which old gender relations are thoroughly shattered. Sexual rebellions are constantly forged in a virtual world and Aruna makes a lay-out of it. The Hockney-an adaptation of a bed that is shared by couples meeting from both sides done by Soumya Samantha is an amusing work. Artist plays with delicate mutations of forms objects and existences.

Subtle sexuality of human existence that often submerges a powerful ‘’ other’ within is literally encountered by Swapna Biswas. The “’femme fatale’’ is pitted as the self that secretly engages in a mysterious company of a ‘’third hand ‘’. Umesh Unni works out the way machines enter the private spaces. Phallic machines and metallic cots are shown as ‘existing’ because the artist gives all due share of palpability of materials and textures that are incorporated with pretty much of compositional rigorousness.

Varun Cursetji works on curiously forensic metamorphosis on a posh cushioned settee that virtually remains as a warm blotch. The hovering eagle over a decorated bed in another work is also an uncomfortable blot on a literal sub-system of imagination. Hariharan sketches the wound getting examined. It is almost like an invitation into body, almost as lovers do, a gentle persuasion of the other into the marks and holes in the body. This has subtle introspective tones. ‘Wound’ problematically corporeal and human but it is often exposed as divine in the religious inheritances. Piyali Ghosh works out a multi-headed being much evoking an old ‘bhadralok babu’ in the Bengali colonial ethos or the puranic anti-hero Ravana. Her thoroughly satirical works functions on multiple layers of references. 

Ingrained violence in experience is consistently addressed by Sujith S N. In this show his work lays out a composition of man, machine and order that opens up nuances of violent regiments of systemic practices. Sumesh Balakrishnan is more explicit in dealing with machines and the human engagement with a violent system of production and destruction. 
Lochan Upadhyay brings up something very serene and humble to the surface, the sprouting little plants over a hill. Idea of ‘house’ is engaged through interesting vertical and horizontal clues in composition in another work. Mahesh Baliga is activating an introspecting mode. He connects his two works through curious punctuations and inter-references as if for viewing he delivers his own artist’s room, the pre-supposed site for engagement with the self.  

One can blame that this is an image-ridden show. Many of the participating artists are explicitly sporting their hybrid anxieties.  It happens because ‘self’ is shattered to the interpretive variants of a hyper- communicative society. Much sportive ‘generation-X’ is not apparently scared of images. There are significant layers of fear and violent dreams underneath but that can now be encountered aesthetically.

This show worked out that sportive and playful imagination can do anything and everything within the spur of a gentle pressure of a dream. Consciousness that was earlier found so hidden and terrific within the limited options of ‘figurative’ or ‘abstract’ has now come so much to the surface of much aesthetic skin layers and committed artist techniques.

Contemporary art experience is widening. It is language and not the ‘subject’ that determines them.  From the common pool of images and  their associations one picks up the props of shock, nasty, pretty, psychedelic, ordered, shuffled and of many such sorts. It is the treatment that further ‘de-signs’ the prop.  It is the way of presentation that counts.

Gallery OED has also made a significant headway into professional presentation of art. A gallery with global standards of art practice is an entirely new experience for art community to find out in Kerala.