Four artists who have given a new spin to questions of identity and belonging
Four leading South Asian artists, one each from India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, will be part of a special exhibition at the upcoming India Art Fair 2017, slated to open in Delhi on 2 February. Bhumika Popli takes stock of their avant-garde leaning
the island. His prime focus is on identity. He says, “My artistic energy tends to explore a number of interpretations on identity. They can range within the discourse of ancestry, tradition, authenticity, urbanity, geo-politics and the like inside the dynamics of contemporary art practices.”
One of the main artists at Kochi Muziri’s Biennale 2016, Subrat Kumar Behera is also a part of this endeavour by Gallery Blueprint. His work, The Eternal Dance of Tribal Drama represents in a sense performing arts. Here one can see traditional dancers, some of which are Gauri dancers and some are the Chhau dancers from Orissa’s Mayurbhanj. These lithographs are connected with each other and each depicts traditional Indian dancers and deities along with imaginary animals. Behera says, “My art has a lot to with the creation of a fantasy world that the spectator enters. I unleash my imagination and let my make-believe unfold one after the other in this real world. It is a space that transcends the limitations of physical reality; limitations that could otherwise become barriers in the expression of my thoughts and skills.”
Mahbubur Rahman is one the most prominent and prolific voices from Bangladesh. He dabbles in various mediums like video, painting, sculpture and performance, to bring out the suffering and unease of Bangladeshi citizens. Lonely King, a sculpture him showcased at the fair, speaks of our society where we worship power and money. One gains more power when one serves and
Long Walk to Freedom, by Nepal-born artist Youdhishtir Mahajan, is a work that is made using a book. Here the artist has erased all the text in Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom except for the periods.
meets others’ wishes. The artist has reinforced his view that like the consumer world, we live in an aggressive society, where someone can be reduced to an insignificant entity easily. He says, “Lonely King is a story about people where everybody is king in his own dream-world unless certain dreams are shattered. My involvement with art and activism, and my observation of political and social conflicts result from a hunger to search for a genuine Bangladeshi identity in the 21st century. This search has taken me across mediums and ideas, transcending boundaries that were created by orthodox academic institutions and fundamentalist political ideologies.”
Long Walk to Freedom, by Nepal- born artist Youdhishtir Mahajan, is a work that is made using a book. Here the artist has erased all the text in Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom except for the periods. Mahajan has dismantled the book’s text to form a scroll and has connected the periods to form one long line which is nearly 180ft long. This rhythmic and arduous task has brought the artist’s mind to a state of meditative stillness, an eternal nothingness. “I am interested in the idea of Sisyphean eternity, monotonous repetition of the same labour over and over again, with no hope or expectation for an end. In the process, I experience different kind of eternity, the sweet kind, which lasts for few material moments, but feels like forever, where the time stops, and with it, stop all my questions and worries, where I am free from my existential burden and get a little closer to myself.”