Painting by Somu Desai

The New Gujarat Contemporaries- Part I

In the art scene of Gujarat, despite the interesting and intriguing political changes, there happens a silent revolution; a revolution destined to change the complexion of art in Gujarat. For the first time, JohnyML articulates this silent revolution and he calls the new breed of Gujarati artists, The New Gujarat Contemporaries.

I am in Baroda and I have a love-hate relationship with this place. After finishing my post graduation in art history from the MS University here in 1995, I have come to this place only a very few times. Many of my friends from all over the country came here, studied, stayed back, struggled, worked, waited for good days, dreamed, wept, fought, cribbed, bitched and finally achieved their goals. This city gave them a lot. While retaining their regional tags, they took pride in being ‘Baroda based artists’. No pogrom, no political unrest could chase them away.

Gallerists and art lovers still visit Baroda as a part of their talent hunt. Even they go to the Kanoria Centre in Ahmedabad to find new artists. All these years I have noticed one thing; these talent hunters were not looking for the local Gujarati artists. When I say Gujarati artists, what I mean is simply this: artists born and brought up in Gujarat and artists whose mother tongue is Gujarati. Somehow, Guajarati artists had been a suppressed lot. May be that is a thing of past. Things are changing for good. Young, vibrant, articulate local Gujarati artists are now everywhere in Baroda. They seem to have outnumbered the artists from other parts of India.

The cosmopolitan and eclectic world view of the Fine Arts Faculty, MS University, Baroda is one of the major reasons that attracted students from different parts of India. The local Gujarati population with keen business acumen did not find fine arts a lucrative area and it should be the reason why the Gujarati parents did not encourage their children to pursue studies in fine arts. If at all students came from the local population, they enrolled themselves as applied arts students, for it was the only field that ‘paid’ for ‘working as an artist’. I remember so many Gujarati students studying in applied arts department, wearing branded clothes, riding two wheelers while the ‘fine arts’ students, mostly non-Gujaratis spending sleepless nights and weary days in rags, borrowed cigarettes, messy food from hostel mess, taking out their existential anger on their boy friends and girl friends. The applied art section was a separate island from the other faculties. There was a safe distance between these departments; the scorn and mutual disrespect were palpable. Even love could not bridge the gap between these faculties. For a real ‘fine artee’ falling in love with an ‘applied artee’ was like a mortal sin. Only Garba dance during the Navaratra festivals could bring them on the same platform, for a few glittering moments of abandonment and glee.

“I passed out from the painting department in 2000. Even at that time there were few local Gujarati students in the fine arts departments,” says Kajal Shah, a young Gujarati artist. “But as the Indian art scene became more rich and colorful, more local students started enrolling themselves in fine arts faculties,” she continues. If so, has the Indian art market boom changed the mindset of the Gujarati parents? Have these erstwhile reluctant parents now see gold in art and they want their children to pursue artistic careers? Or is it a part of the Gujarati Renaissance? The answers should be sought in the works of these Gujarati art students and artists who are seen in the faculty of fine arts and the private studio facilities spread all over the city of Baroda.

Mark my words: The contemporary Gujarati artists are going to change the complexion of the Baroda art scene. This art scene no longer belongs exclusively to the artists from outside. By saying this, my intention is not to promote a petty regionalism, though, the ‘regionalisms’ are very much a part and parcel of the Indian contemporary art scene. Historically speaking, there has been a lull amongst the Gujarati artists for the last two decades. Mid eighties saw the emergence of Narrative School under the efficient leadership of Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and Bhupen Khakkar, both Gujaratis. The modern-postmodern interface was then replete with the presence of other Gujarati artists like Nagji Bhai Patel, Jeram Patel, Jyoti Bhatt, Jyotsna Bhatt, Haku Shah, Amit Ambalal and so on. With the waning of modernism and the narrative school by late eighties and early nineties, we see the Gujarati artists taking a backseat. I don’t know, perhaps those people who are more aware of the closer to home facts could debate this issue further.

The arrival of the Gujarati artists in the current decade is almost like a silent revolution; a revolution with no organized strategies or politico-cultural agenda. No manifesto brings them together, yet they are together. Couple of common studio facilities provided by Priyashree Patodia (Priyashree Studios) and the Alembic Group (Space Studio) function as their working and meeting place. The ABS Red Earth Gallery, Sarjan Gallery and the Fine Arts Faculty Gallery provide them with space of exhibition. These artists are organized with an internal dynamics. They are not only driven by the prospects of economic success but also by aesthetic concerns. And interestingly none of them are too loud in aesthetically articulating the socio-political issues of the contemporary times. Their home grown political problems do not directly reflect in their works and they are not into a sloganeering spree through works of art.

This aesthetic subtlety of these young Gujarati artists in articulating the immediate and the historical makes each artist’s works distinct from those of the other. This aesthetic renaissance and resurgence cannot be brought under any common term or a school. They are more like individuals with existential concerns, culling up momentum from the surroundings, history and art history, and of course, they are all keen on their success as professional artists. While the non-Gujarati artists settled in Baroda boldly and with a missionary verve articulate the recent socio-political and religious unrest of the state in their works, this new crop of Gujarati artists keep themselves away from addressing these issues directly and it is quite intriguing.

I try to find a parallel between the German population (the generic Aryan Germans) and these Gujarat artists. Both the parties do not want to address the pogroms that happened in their states as they feel they too somehow hold the historical responsibility of being partisans to the crime. There is a sense of guilt and an effort to overcome it through subtle humanitarian ways. Shrugging off a history is impossible for both of them, but living with it, understanding it, articulating it and surpassing seem to be their aim, not through breast beating and dissociating but through internalization and catharsis. In this trait, the Gujarati contemporaries stick out as a different lot from the artists from the other states, who most often directly address the socio-political issues peculiar to their states.

May be distancing from the real events and keeping a socio-cultural insularity provide the artists from elsewhere with some vantage platforms, from where they could see things, analyze and articulate as impartial observers, which perhaps is not possible for an artist who is culturally, socially, politically, religiously, economically and linguistically aligned with the immediate events. This alignment and in-ness handicap them in certain ways, but in my observation, they take this handicap to their stride and use it for developing different modes of articulation. I would like to discuss the varying visual languages of the Gujarati contemporary artists in another essay, which would be a supplement to this essay.

I see the works of Somu Desai, Bhavin Mistry, Hena Mistry, Disha Jani, Isha Diwanji, Nikita Parikh, Kajal Shah, Ambu Bhai, Nimesh Patel, Vinod Patel, Chirag Patel and many others. All of them are Gujaratis and none of them belong to any particular school of visual thinking. They don’t even belong to the ‘Baroda School’. They doubt mediatic and mediatized realism. They dispute the color field abstractions. They question installations for the sake of making installations. They probe the textural construction of surfaces while exploring all the possibilities of textures. They create narratives while spoofing the high serious modern narrative traditions. They experiment with mediums and materials. While the others see the larger political scenario, they experience the life of unarticulated innards of the city. The Gujarati experience is here in their works and I would call them the New Gujarat Contemporaries.