The Promise of Tomorrow
The annual Kumbh Mela of art threw up some young artists, united by their ingenuity and audacity
The annual Kumbh Mela of art threw up some young artists, united by their ingenuity and audacity.
Under his seven-tiered wedding cake chandelier made of pink plastic brushes, Siddhartha Karawal bares his teeth in a growl and a grimace. Outside, under a dreary, overcast wintry afternoon sun, Anindita Dutta is patting wet red clay in a cosmic spiral that promises to energise anyone who steps into it. With his grotesque tapestry of hundreds of severed cock heads, Shine Sivan prompts both seduction and repulsion. With her many layered drawings superimposed on plexiglass sheets, Remen Chopra pierces the veils of time and memory. And in a quiet act of self-redemption, Avinash Veeraraghavan embroiders dreams that harbour delusions.
Here, at the junction of art, commerce and knowledge, the bewildered and the believing have gathered in their hundreds to participate in the annual highlight of the visual arts calendar—its Kumbh Mela, as it were—the India Art Fair 2014. Suave gallerists, pontificating curators, well-heeled collectors and smart socialites have all descended from near and far to be enlightened, amused and entertained by artists and art works.
Over four tightly-packed days and nights (including unending rounds of parties, receptions, cocktails and dinners), the fair saw the city whirling in one long bout of art-induced ecstasy. “The sixth edition of IAF has brought a range of new galleries from Germany, France, Portugal, and of course, India,” proclaims the young and dynamic Neha Kirpal, who has single-handedly created the ‘property’ that is the IAF. “With 96 per cent of exhibitors reporting good sales, and a number of exhibitors selling out entirely, the fair reinforces the recent renewed sense of market confidence that has been felt across the Indian art scene,” she adds.
She is endorsed by the even younger Roshini Vadehra of Vadehra Art Gallery: “So far, this fair has been one of the best in years for sales.” Kirpal says she had collectors from Middle-Eastern countries “as well as new buyers from Indian cities like Surat, Ludhiana and Ahmedabad. Besides, real estate firms are milling around looking for art to add value to their projects”. A delegation of Chinese art buffs led by Indonesian-Chinese collector Budi Tek, and representatives from MOMA in New York and the Tate, London, also made their presence felt.
Notwithstanding the market pep talk, the overall quality of works displayed at this year’s fair was at best tepid. Stars like Atul Dodiya, Subodh Gupta, Reena and Jitish Kallat put in only a token appearance and the bigger international galleries like Lisson and Hauser & Wirth opted out altogether. The overall design of the fair was dismal and the so-called Special Projects were, alas, not so special. So it was left to the Speakers’ Forum programme, rather brilliantly put together by critic and curator Gayatri Sinha around the topic “Art and the Public”, to raise the bar. Besides, taking advantage of IAF, several galleries and institutions have put up a number of significant exhibitions around the city and these vied with the art on view at IAF. Among these, the solo shows by Nalini Malani at Vadehra Gallery, L.N. Tallur at Nature Morte and Sonia Khurana’s Oneiric House, in an abandoned house in Jor Bagh, are on till month-end and not to be missed.
What lifted the spirits at IAF were a number of individual works by younger and lesser-known artists. Whacky and ambitious, these art makers are irreverent in their attitudes and their imaginations fear few boundaries. Take Karawal, whose fabulous seven-tiered chandelier of brushes made to look like dentures and sarcastically titled ‘Denture Venture’, literally makes your jaw drop. A product of M.S. University, Baroda, Karawal won the Best Display Award at the annual students’ show in 2009. Since then, his effervescent energy and quirky imagination has made a splash in Delhi and Mumbai. He was also included in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale of 2012. According to writer and curator Himali Singh, “Karawal’s cunning use of materials hides their original identity while holding a mirror to society. As the viewer chuckles on seeing his work, the work chuckles back at the viewer. Flamboyant colours scream at the plastic consumerism of society and the decay of the same teeth that bite more than they can chew.” Bhavna Kakker, editor of Take on Art magazine, adds: “Karawal’s idea is to break the visual baggage that a viewer brings along every time s/he sees a work of art to trigger an unfamiliar reaction.”
Reactions are even more extreme in the case of the Keralaborn and Delhi-Agra-trained Shine Sivan. Working out of his studio in Faridabad, Sivan subverts notions of gender, identity and beauty through his oh-so-bewitchingly-macabre sculptures, videos and performances. In his brilliantly executed, somewhat eerie works, he tries to operate in the cracks between stereotype and ‘abnormality’. Several of his works make use of taxidermy, alluding to the inherent dynamic between life and death, seduction and repulsion. Sivan debuted with his solo show, Sperm Weaver, in 2009, at Mumbai’s Gallery Maskara. In a rapid rise, he has been shown at Tate Modern and at the Prague Biennale since then.
Displaying Sivan’s tapestry of severed chicken heads, Mumbai gallerist and curator Abhay Maskara says, “Sivan’s works are visually stunning yet conceptually complex. He works across multiple media—video, sculpture, performance, drawing and photography—and attempts to redefine the psychological constructs and roles attached to masculinity.”
With mind as his canvas, Bangalore-based Avinash Veeraraghavan is a weaver of dreams. Chennai-born Veeraraghavan trained in a post-school programme with Italian conceptual artist and designer Andrea Anastasio. He first attracted attention with his amazing book I Love My India: Stories for a City in 2002.
Over the last decade, Veeraraghavan’s practice has grown in both techniques and concerns. A continual negotiation with mental health led his art take on a cathartic function. In his amazingly evocative images, visual patterns are generated through systematic repetition “as if by habit or conditioning, to construct forms and meanings that are different from the sum of the parts,” he says.
More recently, these highly personal visions have taken another dimension, incorporating traditional crafts like embroidery and wood inlay. “Other than sharing his work, Veeraraghavan has exposed me to wonderful music, mainly Indian classical,” says Sunitha Kumar Emmart of Gallery SKE.
The Italian gallery M.K. Search Art presented works of Delhi artist Remen Chopra. In Chopra’s works, past collides with present in a cycle of repeat-fast forward-pause. The human figure (mostly a woman) here negotiates a fractured, disorienting memory—a past life lived in the present through multiple layers and apparitions, executed by a melding of graphic techniques, including drawing, stencilling, photography and the use of shadow.
Trained at the College of Art, Delhi, Chopra also studied art history at Sienna, Italy, and one can perceive both the impact of the Renaissance and Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini in her art. Chopra creates flat works on paper, as well as free-standing sculptures. Her large wall-mounted drawings depict indeterminate dream-like environs overlaid with video projections and shadow play of cutouts. “These layers allow me to render both past and present simultaneously,” says Chopra, adding that her characters “go through time, place, identity and memory to question the notion of truth.”
Exhibit 320, a gallery that focuses on younger talent, presented works by Sachin George Sebastian. Kerala-born and Ahmedabad-trained Sebastian is a paper engineer. With intricately cut and cleverly folded paper, he creates flowers, trees, gardens and even whole cities. A bachelor in communication design from National Institute of Design ( NID), he was about to join a theme park as a concept developer when he chanced on a pop-up book. From that day on, he was hooked: “Everything I was interested in—form, structure, surprise—seemed to converge in it,” he says. He taught himself what he later learnt were ancient Japanese arts of origami and kirigami. Eight years and several group and solo exhibitions later, he has emerged as a muchac-claimed paper sculptor with a vision of nature and the urban environment. Rasika Kajaria, who brought his work at IAF, recalls that she was immediately impressed by his work when she encountered it in 2010. “He explores global issues of urban migration, growth of the metropolis and urban chaos in contemporary culture through his marvellous cut-and-fold paper sculptures.”
In the age of the New Art, the ‘conceptual’ is no longer about theories but about expressing ideas of the self and the world through quirky, unconventional materials—from toothbrushes to cut paper to severed chicken heads—to make a point.