CONJURED LANGUAGE
AConjuror’s Archive’ at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi (between December 4, 2018 and January 12, 2019), focusing on the work of Jangarh Singh Shyam, is the first retrospective of a contemporary Indian folk artist. Shyam, who hailed from Madhya Pradesh, is credited with the genesis of the Gond painting tradition. But curator Jyotindra Jain points out that the term ‘Gond’ itself is a misnomer, as Shyam belonged to the Pardhan tribe, whose pantheon of deities and mythologies were the subjects of his art. The show draws upon Jain’s decades-long engagement with folk culture, and sets new paradigms for the study of indigenous artists’ interaction with modernism through what he terms as “extra-cultural interventions” such as paper, industrially produced pigments, new techniques of printmaking and the freedom to explore one’s immediate surroundings as subjects. Cocurator Roobina Karode explains that the “exhibition explores the development of what has been called by art critics the ‘Jangarh qalam’—a unique visual language”.
The show traces the trajectory of Shyam’s practice from 1981 to his suicide while on a residency in Japan in 2001. It includes photographs of images painted on the walls of his village hut to Shyam painting a mural at the Bharat Bhavan, and the narrative devices he invented to depict myths of creation to iconic paintings of composite deities and the natural
world. A section is devoted to his collaboration with indigenous Australian artists, while another highlights his experiments with printmaking. A large number of black and white line drawings reveal that Shyam was not merely a master of the ‘Gond’ style of building up images with stippling dots of different colours.
The show is a crucial intervention in the art versus ethnography discourse that lay at the heart of the Bharat Bhavan project helmed by cultural stalwart J. Swaminathan and the debates that erupted around ‘Magiciens de la Terre’—an exhibition of international contemporary art in 1989 at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, with works by artists from 50 countries (including Shyam) that attempted to collapse the boundaries between urban and folk art. Incisive texts by Jain in the show underline the construction of the category of ‘tribal’ art, indeed of the ‘traditions’ that were invented as indigenous artists transformed their ouvre with the introduction of paper and their movement into urban cultural centres and art commissions. The need to perform ‘tribal’ identity in order to be authentic is seen in a photograph of Shyam dressed as a tribal for a gallery’s brochure, even as facsimiles of letters that Shyam wrote in his last weeks from Japan underline the inequality of the circumstances in which non-urban artists are made to produce work.