India Today

ART AS DRAMEDY

As it puts on display the work of some of India’s foremost artists, an ongoing group show in Delhi makes you laugh and ponder all at the same time

- Ruchir Joshi

Curated by Dipti Anand, A Lick of Night in the Morning (on display at Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery until November 11) is a small and very pleasurabl­e show, consisting of work by six well-establishe­d Indian artists and a small metal sculpture by Balkrishna Doshi, the great doyen of Indian architectu­re. Except for the pieces by Atul Dodiya and a new iteration of an older piece by N.S. Harsha, all of the work is from the last two years or so.

Anju Dodiya has two contributi­ons—a combine and a painting, each with one of her typical solitary figures. The unmistakab­le, tannic quality of the depictions plays off, in one against the asymmetric­al tessellati­on of brightly patterned fabric, in the other under the cloudburst of a deep crimson wash, eliciting meditation on solitude and the heft of dreams and thoughts.

After a lifetime of practice, Sudhir Patwardhan has arrived at a twinned distillati­on of looking and of empathy that is singular in contempora­ry Indian painting. The two works displayed here are an acrylic sketch and a canvas in

oil; in each, the press of the invisible city bends the spine of an old man— one sitting, clutching a bag or a tiffinbox at possibly a railway platform, the other on a hospital bed with his back to us, a figure somehow emaciated and bloated at the same time, his unseen face indicated vividly in the stern yet pitying gaze of the much younger nurse attending to him. While there is other lovely work in the show, just these two paintings are worth the effort of the trip.

Speaking of his langur sculptures and their intertwine­d tails, N.S. Harsha has mentioned that he partly got the idea from a folk tale of rats getting their tails fatally entangled. In ‘Tamasha

– Kiska Sunu?’, four langurs adopt different poses while suspended

Selected works by B.V. Doshi and six other artists are on display at Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery

off the wall, each animal with a similar mudra of a long pre-sapien finger pointing heavenward­s. While their tails are interlaced, the linking seems more like an act of celebrator­y, seditious communicat­ion rather than of mutual entrapment. At one level, the upward pointing fingers indicate some higher being that is witness to everything. On the other hand, these beings are themselves all-seeing, all-hearing, alltalking—a cheerful, crouching cabal of simian umpires, giving out the human race for its grotesque shenanigan­s and sending us back to the pavilion of oblivion. Going closer, you see the nuts and bolts that hold up each sculpture, the obvious cloth ropes that make up the snaking tails, the absence of visual subterfuge creating a distancing loop of laughter and contemplat­ion.

A similar mobius strip is created when you sit down and spend some time engaging with Ranbir Kaleka’s new, 5-channel video-sculpture, ‘Synaptic Visions of Dead Time’. On a platform in a darkened room is what seems to be a model of an old ruin, a cave temple of sorts, with five arched corridor-tunnels, each containing a continuati­on of the architectu­re on a small video screen. In the tiny videos, small mysterious things simultaneo­usly unfold with what seems like an aleatory synchronic­ity: asteroid-like stones drop through; light changes on ancient walls; a man in a suit sits in a chair and brings down a heavy mallet, conjuring up a docile horse; in one window, a tree and sky form the sliver of a landscape from a Renaissanc­e painting; in another window, a man rows a boat and abruptly disappears in midstroke; flocks of superimpos­ed birds fly through from one window to the next, creating an obviously false continuum of space and time. It’s a flick of sombre absurdity, but also a flame-lick of laughter, pushing against a dark time. ■

 ?? ?? SNAPSHOTS Exhibits that are part of A Lick of Night in the Morning—(clockwise from above) ‘Tamasha – Kiska Sunu?’, ‘Nazar’, ‘Hospital’, ‘If It Rains Fire’, ‘Synaptic Visions of Dead Time’, ‘Late Evening Footboard Riders’, ‘Clouds for a Diver’
SNAPSHOTS Exhibits that are part of A Lick of Night in the Morning—(clockwise from above) ‘Tamasha – Kiska Sunu?’, ‘Nazar’, ‘Hospital’, ‘If It Rains Fire’, ‘Synaptic Visions of Dead Time’, ‘Late Evening Footboard Riders’, ‘Clouds for a Diver’
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