|
‘Kashi’ - an impressive retrospective
In this interesting review of Kashi 10 Light Years show, Kavita Balakrishnan finds out the truth of the Mumbai-Kochi axis in contemporary Indian art and also sensitively locates the aesthetical nuances that facilitated such an axis.
‘Kashi - ten light years’ is a show of thirty eight contemporary artists who have in some significant ways been associating with Kashi Art Gallery, Kochi over the past ten years. For an observer of contemporary Indian Art these displayed works and artists may stand each alone for validations quite at variance. Some of them are dominant figures over the decade on a national scene while some are still to make a substantial mark in individual terms. But here is a Gallery located far down south in the country looking back at its own eventful past trying to identify itself as a connecting link across geographies and sensibilities of Contemporary Art not less than ‘global’ by all aspirations.
There is a modulated nexus between ‘Malayali’ identity and contemporary Art felt in the recent years on the national or even international scenario. (This is not so much an isolated phenomenon. Some more other regional selves that are both geographically and culturally marginalised from the mainstream of ‘Indian’ experiences have tried to assert in some similar ways or the other under the will of ‘successful ones’ who could cross the limits first. Say for example Subodh Gupta bringing in the ‘Bihari’ cues and props). A curious ‘Mumbai-Kochi axis’ has been churning the professional ambitions of those who were basically located in Kerala who returned after taking art education from outside or from within the regional institutions and remained in much under nourished conditions for Art here. For those who already made it successful in some particular ‘multi-cultural’ and metropolitan locations, like Mumbai for example, establishing this axis was part of their wilful multi-local claims beyond ‘identity politics’ of any delimiting sort. Artists have increasingly started stating their ‘shuttling betweens’ instead of ‘living and working in a single place’.
Kashi Art Gallery derived its significance in its effective make up as a receptacle that could make some use of this general confluence in the Art scene.
An ‘art atmosphere’ in the sense of gallery practices was only latent in Kerala when ‘Kashi’ began as a cafe cum gallery in 1997. Kerala was not in the locus of national art scene, though some influential names and artist groups were more or less acclaimed and criticised as that ‘of Malayalis’. Marginalisation of Malayalis always had double edges as their getting ascribed to clichéd claims of ‘political consciousnesses’ ‘high literacy rate’ and ‘critical intellectualism’ for which often these people are both weighed up and down in a broader base of situations.
However, global situations in the beginning of the millennium helped to kindle a new spirit that assembled a ‘Malayali’ community of artists as revising themselves in the new world. ‘Exile and Longing’, an exhibition of artists from Kerala shown in Mumbai Lakeeren gallery (2000) interestingly had only one artist (Gopikrishna) as located that time in Kerala. The ‘Bombay X 17’ exhibition (2003) showed at Kashi art gallery functioned on a local / global framework that showed both malayali and non-malayali artists together on a platform and assertively challenged the more or less ‘metropolitan self’ onto the regional experiences of life here. During the same period Bose Krishnamachari came up with his show ‘De-curating Indian Art’ at Durbar Hall of Kerala Lalitha Kala Academi. ‘Double Enders’ in 2005 made a grand assembling craft of ‘Malayali artists’ much across certain vantage points of art and geographical locations. That show ended its metro-tour in Durbar Hall Kochi. Later Bose’s LAVA show was hosted in Kashi Art Gallery.
All these were events in the above mentioned ‘Mumbai-Kochi axis’, on their own merit that made serious introspective moments for many artists in Kerala who propelled themselves to practice Art with a re-vision. Experiencing multiple localities became a professional challenge for them. Interestingly, Kochi’s multi-cultural ambience even attracted some artists here to more or less settle there leaving their interior townships. Some left their jobs with brevity of sorts to focus on producing good work of art. Now, things have changed in this local grid of Kerala as much as world Art scene is replete with multi-local experiences. There is also an increasing number of ‘non-malayali’ participation in Art events of Kochi now. On one hand, the issue of cultural / regional difference in sensibility is camouflaged by this diffusion of the systemic changes into the margins. On the other hand, culturally specific but nuanced experiences of the so called ‘global living conditions’ surface more clearly than ever.
I could not help this fairly long rumination over the changing condition because this show proudly recapitulates its own significant past that cut across these conditions. I do not attempt a comprehensive enumeration of all the participating works here mainly because these are desperately different sensibilities at work and this is slightly big exhibition for such an attempt. Individual artists in this show can claim different degrees of merit in functioning as active agents of above mentioned changes in the scenario. Even when one artist in this show takes a route that is not substantial, whatsoever the efficacy of the work shown, he or she becomes significant simply by participating for a professional cause that brought a locality into a particular schema of art activities in India. So let me briefly trace some concerns, introspections, crisis and dialogues surfacing in these works.
Bose krishnamachari’s ‘stretched bodies’ and Rajan Krishnan’s ‘zone of spectres’ shown here are already much circulated and familiar works through galleries and art magazines. Many are already aware of these ‘almost historical objects’ in the recent flux of changes in taste. So looking at them now again was giving an impression of looking at ‘old’ works in a blatantly renewing Art world getting signalled from all corners of the world. But these works particularly mark certain shifts in sensibilities that attracted a chunk of artists and art students working in this locale for a couple of years now.
On a lighter note, some of the students in college of fine arts were heard telling about Bose’s work that ‘now seeing it from such closeness we find that it is not as easy as we thought earlier to work such a painting’. On a bit brighter note, an artist like Bhagyanathan in his work ‘space and ladder’ within his personal scheme of things and memories even includes the legendary blue wagon that transported Art works for ‘Double Enders’.
An exciting fact of this show is that it gets a fresh Riyas Komu, that too projecting a very effective display of loss of memory / authority. Some pangs of survival are visible in T P Premji’s bronzes. Survival takes an ironic twist in the dramatic fancy worked out by George Martin. ‘Death’ as a much politicised experience haunts some artists very strongly. N N Rimzon had quite some time been grappling with issues of estranged conditions of life in these desolate landscapes and domesticities. ‘skull near the beach’, the work shown in this show is one among his pictorially drafted concerns. Babu Xavier comes up with ‘printed horror series’ though in effect sharing less of an angst. T V Santhosh retains vital reds in the mediatic text and he doesn’t seem to bother much to tone down or saturate the violence into pinks this time.
Interestingly, ‘animals’ are portrayed as carriers –objects - of tilted meaninglessness in human life in some works. And objects are also useful sites for displaying misplaced private mythologies.
Raghunathan in his painted fibre casting, very well animated the stupidity of his object -the animal carrying the dots and signs of domesticity and belongingness. What is painted is not simply what is painted. That is the case with K P Reji’s unassuming painting. Sudarshan Shetty’s old (1998) work – chairs with tilted legs in front of a hung painting- interestingly looks quite fitting with such shared ambience of ironic domesticities. A rhetorical realism of sorts is worked out by Gopikrishna. He brings psychotic nuances into the ways of seeing reality. It may still proclaim a graspable personal space in the curious vacuum felt within the order of ritual, power, loyalty and authority in many regional quasi-feudal contexts of life spanning across the civilizational remnants of our life.
Over a period of time in the new scenario, there emerged some painters of amazing visions of nature infused with meticulous and magnanimous details. V N Jyothibasu recently gained pretty good attention in the Indian art scene for this. But he presented too small work in this show to be seen. Instead, one finds Jyothikumar with a cute graphite work on paper in some similar vein, with a peculiar reverence felt through the treatment.
Meanwhile, Sunoj D painted a huge size ‘monument to urban single living’. Sosa Joseph also painted a big work but big for no much visible reasons. There are Hema Upadhyay, sheetal Gattani,Aji V N, Prajaktha Palav, Upendranath, Anup Mathew Thomas, Valsan Koorma Kollery and Anant Joshy who present independent trajectories quite different from the general ambience of the show. Some are very introspective, much held in deceivingly low key. Some are quite expressive like for example Chintan Upadhyay’s ‘loss innocence’ that brings up a third world schema of identity into disquieting brightness and assertiveness.
|
