Subversive IN SUBURBIA
A MONTH LONG SHOW AT ART AND CHARLIE, MUMBAI, SHOWCASING THE WORKS OF POONAM JAIN AND YOGESH BARVE POSES SEVERAL QUESTIONS TO THE VIEWER
OOne visionary curator plus two talented artists with subversive tendencies who’ve known each other for over a decade equals one extraordinary exhibition that asks Three Questions At Once (like its title), if not several more! The show by Poonam Jain and Yogesh Barve will be on between April 26 and May 25, at Art and Charlie in Mumbai’s hip suburb of Bandra.
Curator Zeenat Nagree tells us how, at the core of the exhibition, is the idea that in whatever we create in our lives, and even in our daily activities, we carry certain questions with us. These questions even question how we engage with the world. While Jain’s take is more of an examination of the past and its fast-fading relevance in the present, Barve’s gaze is towards the future and whether or not we should hop on to the trajectory of technology. So dierent in concept and creation and yet so complementary as a theme.
This is an exhibition where you can leave all rules at the door. Nagree explains how this plays out, with her curatorial text printed on two decks of cards, one for each artist. The decks feature text on artworks but also cheeky instructions on how one can engage with the artworks. She says, “I want[ed] to use this to challenge how an exhibition is viewed. Even if people do not enact the instructions, the ideas are inserted in their minds. For example, what if you read the letters on Poonam’s prints out loud? What if you tried to count the lines on one of Yogesh’s drawings?”
Expect drawings, letterpress prints, etchings, a video, and an interactive installation, and singer and actor Suman Sridhar reading Jain’s letterpress prints of Devanagari letters as scores on opening night. The ground floor of the space is filled with kilos and kilos of the small circles produced when a set of papers is punched for spiral binding. “The audience will have to wade through this paper as if they are on a beach. Our usual instinct is to not touch paper with our feet, but this breaks that rule. We are confronted with residues of the kind of archiving activity that happens around us every day. The work addresses what is left out, what falls through the holes,” says Nagree. The space also has an LCD screen on which Barve’s video Global III plays. The video isn’t visible to the naked eye as the screen’s polariser film has been taken o and the video can only be seen through polarised glasses. Apparently, this strategy came from concerns with passive engagement. Whatever way you interpret the diverse work, one thing is for sure, the show gives you a fresh feel of freedom and unpacks some food for thought too.
Ifyou’re a Sherlock Holmes fan, you’ll remember the passage from ‘The Greek Interpreter’ where Sherlock describes his elder brother Mycroft—supposedly, a greater deductive mind. But the man had “no ambition and no energy” to follow up on the leads his great mind opened up. This Sherlock/ Mycroft distinction is also, in a way, the dierence between detective and police work. The latter is a considerably larger skill-set that goes beyond the cold precision of ‘pure’ deductive reasoning.
Anita Nair’s Inspector Gowda is a great example of this distinction and also of character growth within a series. Ever since we first met him in Cut Like Wound (2012), he has been a talented investigator—but by the end of the third book, Hot Stage, we realise that he has become much more. He has learned to be more restrained in highpressure situations, less likely to take the bait when a vengeful senior ocer is trying to get a rise out of him. In Hot Stage, the murder before him is that of Professor Mudgood, a rationalist and anti-superstition activist who draws the ire of right-wing Hindu groups in Bangalore (clearly inspired by the murder of Narendra Dabholkar in 2013). Everybody thinks the killing is politically motivated, but Gowda, astute as ever, unravels a larger conspiracy.
The novel’s three-dimensional characters are its biggest strength. The righteous Prof. Mudgood, we are shown, was a petty and mischievous man who was deeply patriarchal. Gowda’s junior Santosh is a bright-eyed chap who idolises Gowda and is eager to learn but, through this overenthusiasm, ends up placing him and his team into trouble.
Hot Stage and its predecessors are books that are extremely well-versed in the science of footprints, blood spatters and gunshot residue et al. This does not mean that Nair underestimates the value of good, old-fashioned, observational investigation, things like noticing the body language shift in a room full of potential suspects.
Without giving away too much, I will say this—I enjoyed how it tied in with concerns longtime citizens have about Bangalore, about its lopsided development, and its vanishing civic spaces. Hot Stage confirms the now 51-year-old Borei Gowda as arguably the most interesting sleuth in Indian literature, and certainly the most resilient one.