• 
• 
• 
• 

Skeptical Juxtapositions

A group show of ten Kerala based artists, curated by noted art historian R.Nandakumar was presented by the Apparao Galleries in New Delhi. Unlike the artists working from the metropolitan cities, these artists still look at the fast growing corporatism with skepticism and doubt, observes JohnyML

‘Crossovers and Overlaps’, a group show of ten Kerala based artists, curated by the noted art historian and theoretician R.Nandakumar at the Apparao Galleries (Triveni Kala Sangham), New Delhi, for me is an interesting case study; a case study on how the artists negotiate the changes happening around them from their own social locations, removed from the urban centers.

Changes that occur in the contemporary world due to the proliferation of corporatism could be viewed from different perspectives; some could challenge it, some could embrace it and some could dispassionately view it and register the changes in their works. If corporatism/globalization is the all encompassing word for socio-economic and political changes, what could be the future of things, different from as we see today? Art could be one of the ways to unpack this issue and it is exactly what these Kerala based artists do by taking different positions and perspectives in their personal lives and works.

Participating artists are Abul Kalam Azad, Aditi Nayar, Babukkutty George, Bini Roy, Ganesh Babu, Jeevan Thomas, Pushkin EH, Sreenandan TK, Sunil Gangadharan and Tensingh Joseph. Most of these artists shared a common ideological position at some point of their careers though it became almost impossible to carry on with such ideological adherence till the present time. However, as the title of the show says, curatorially their works could be collated to see whether they still carry some traits of their previous ideological positions.

Most of those artists based in Kerala have a tendency to deal with the socio-political issues quite vehemently in their works as they still feel that art is a necessary tool that could intervene in the social discourse and if need be change the course of it. Interestingly, almost all the artists who participate in this show predominantly deal with two issues; the question of identity, its socio-economic and politico-cultural negotiations and the issues pertaining to the depletion of environment and eco system mainly due to the covert and overt interference of imperial forces of varying hues.

Social identity as a point of contestation comes to play a pivotal role in the works of Abul Kalam Azad, Ganesh Babu, Babukkutty George, Sreenandan TK and Aditi Nayar. Abul Kalam Azad, an established photography artist picks and chooses his characters from the local life of Kerala and gives them iconic status. These images of the people who flaunt their identities in terms of uniform or tools become icons in themselves and open up a ‘body field’ for deconstructing those notions that make their identities fixed and give them a socio-mythological status.

Ganesh Babu’s works is a set of narratives overlapped and juxtaposed deliberately. Global and local issues like terrorism and daily survival are brought together using expressionist language, which perhaps looks a bit out of the stream considering the changes in the art language that deal with more or less same issues elsewhere. Babukkutty George also looks stuck up in time as he deals with the daily human life in an affected wood cut style. Sreenandan’s language hovers around the Italian Trans-Avant garde style. Aditi Nayar uses the image of an ostrich repetitively in order to express the self-hood of a woman in particular and the human beings in general.

Bini Roy, Jeevan Thomas and Tensingh Joseph deal mainly with the issues of environment. Bini Roy’s works are romantic in nature and in all the works she repetitively paints flowers and waterborne plants as if she were remembering a sylvan past in contrast with the ‘ugly’ present. Jeevan Thomas, an artist activist who has been doing a kind of protest art against the incursions of the imperial forces, presents an apocalyptic view of the present where knowledge systems are misused for cutting the human abilities. The scene that Jeevan portrays looks like a scene from deluge where a lonely angel is seen inside a huge bottle with his wings severed from the shoulders. If we look at this angel in the perspective of Walter Benjamin, this cherub could be history who is failed by the very historical process, unable to withstand the storms of occurrences. Tensing Joseph too, interestingly presents an angel with two massive wings of wood, caught in the stillness of existence. His paintings show a kind of environmental concerns with a violin shrouded by foliages.

Pushkin E.H and Sunil Gangadharan approach the immediate surroundings differently. Pushkin’s works mostly represent the ‘last man standing’; the one who has gone through the positives and negatives. Now this protagonist could see things dispassionately. Pushkin is like a sampler of history as he culls out certain referential images from past and present then posits them to a field where they achieve a new meaning. The lonely man who walks through the rain at once becomes a coat of arms and a man who just passes through time without resisting it. The portrait of Subhash Chandra Bose in Pushkin works in fact does not directly comment to the death of history on the contrary it exemplifies the anachronism of revolution, which has either occurred too early or become comical by later arrival. Pushkin does not comment on the rights and wrongs of the images directly but he emblematizes the movement of time, slow and steady progression or regression of time using the image of a bicycle that comes again and again in Pushkin’s repertoire of paintings.

Sunil Gangadharan, though trained as a sculptor, shows his prowess in drawing, which he has been religiously polishing for the last twenty five years. Sunil captures his immediate surroundings like a chronicler. He avoids the immediate human drama from his works and imparts them with the sheen of a cartographer’s diary. The sea port towns, which are quite familiar to him become scenes from yester years as if they were caught in the trap of history and are not able to move further. Sunil, very skillfully incorporates art historical elements with the detached portraits of places, giving them a pattern like look for a re-look of the immediate.

What I infer from all these works is this: These artistic negotiations of the contemporary times are not celebratory. They still carry a bit of skepticism in them. They still believe in history and its intepretational possibilities. Their locations become counter fields to the urban centers as their articulations still want to connect to the past rather than to the present.