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Business News/ Leisure / The age of shape shifters
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The age of shape shifters

The age of shape shifters

Global: Systematic Citizen 9 to 9 by Riyas Komu.Harikrishna Katragadda/MintPremium

Global: Systematic Citizen 9 to 9 by Riyas Komu.Harikrishna Katragadda/Mint

The circus really grew up between 2000 and 2009, as far as contemporary Indian art is concerned. The market, which had previously existed largely in the modes of dream, hope and aspiration, suddenly became a reality during this decade. While Indian art may not have aggregated a significant share in the global art market in these nine years, it has been identified as an area of potential growth. The activity of auction houses such as Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Saffronart and Osian’s has motivated galleries to acquire momentum and bear greater risks in their choice and positioning of artists.

Global: Systematic Citizen 9 to 9 by Riyas Komu.Harikrishna Katragadda/Mint

While other prestigious galleries, including Bose Pacia, Nature Morte, Vadehra, Sakshi, Chemould and Pundole, had also extended their practice transnationally in various ways, the Bodhi phenomenon triggered off a widespread reassessment of capability and a refinement of benchmarks within the Indian gallery system. Bodhi’s subsequent retreat, in the face of the global recession, should not erase its transformative contribution.

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The boom in the Indian art market, while it lasted, was a mixed blessing. If it attracted a legion of investors (no bad thing), it also attracted the attention of the speculators (a curse). The subsequent collapse and slow resurgence of the Indian art market has prompted an exodus of the speculators, sobered up the investors and dented the credibility of the interlocking mechanisms of gallery and auction sales. However, these upheavals have also had a curious, unexpected and entirely welcome effect: They have brought back a more serious kind of collector as well as opened up the domain to a wide viewership that may never acquire a work but will extend its imagination through contact with the visual arts. This new viewership, with its hunger for knowledge, now supports a variety of informal platforms and nascent institutions, such as Jnana-pravaha in Mumbai and the Religare Arts Initiative in New Delhi, around which a new community of viewers is certain to develop.

Between 2000 and 2009, even as Indian artists became more active globally, at the intersection of the worlds of the international biennale, the high-profile museum and the global art market, there emerged a class of international artist of Indian origin, so to speak. Dayanita Singh and Subodh Gupta, in their very different ways, exemplify this class, both remaining firmly anchored in the transitional and complex society of their birth yet moving fluently and eloquently through the circuits of an emerging globality.

In parallel, a number of Indian curators, critics and theorists also began to work increasingly in the global system. This twin advance, artistic as well as discursive, has helped effect radical transformations of practice. As more Indian artists are invited to exhibit at international biennales and triennales, they are empowered to develop new forms of practice, unrelated to the gallery circuit. During the last decade, artists based in India have shown at the highest level of the global art system: Two editions each of the Documenta, the Venice Biennale, the Gwangju Biennale, and numerous other periodic exhibitions have hosted Indian artists, including Dayanita Singh, the Raqs Media Collective, Ravi Agarwal, Amar Kanwar, Sheela Gowda, Subodh Gupta, Atul Dodiya, Riyas Komu, Jitish Kallat, Sudarshan Shetty and Shilpa Gupta.

Make art, not war: Gandhi’s Three Monkeys by Subodh Gupta on display at the India Art Summit 2009 in New Delhi. Harikrishna Katragadda/Mint

Atul Dodiya articulates his resistance to the cultural politics of the majoritarianism through rhetorically charged paintings and elegiac sculpture-installations. Jitish Kallat plays off the reverberations of textuality and the punch of the visual in his paintings and sculptures. Subodh Gupta mobilizes vast sculpture-installation ensembles, paints and works in video and performance. Bose Krishnamachari generates large-format abstractions, organizes social projects that transform the gallery into a library, convenes groups of artists into snapshot exhibitions, and proposes his lifestyle as an ongoing claim-in-performance. Baiju Parthan paints mammoth diptychs in a distinctive code that resists reading, but exhibits digital-interactive works that invite the viewer-user into the unpredictable realm of virtual reality.

Ranjit Hoskote multiplies his time between poetry, cultural theory and curating exhibitions of contemporary art

Bringing playful idiosyncrasy and astute political awareness into play, Ram Rahman, Ravi Agarwal, Gigi Scaria, N.S. Harsha, Krishnaraj Chonat, Avinash Veeraraghavan, Sarnath Banerjee and Sumedh Rajendran attest to the complex cultural and political predicaments of globalization-era India— through a varied interplay of elements, including projection, sound, animation, the graphic novel, the digital collage and the installation.

Artists such as Shilpa Gupta and the Raqs Media Collective work almost entirely with digital, virtual and discursive media that are almost spectral in form but no less effective. For these artists, the philosophical idea or the political crisis is no longer merely content. It is the material from which they fashion their video-based installations or interactive environments. The exhibition is no longer a showcase of works for the passive delectation of viewers. Rather, it is a proposition, an argument, a conversation that transforms the viewer into an interlocutor. These are ways of engaging with the public urgencies of a planet threatened simultaneously by militarization, terror, ecological catastrophe, deepening sectarian rifts and the closing of the formerly liberal mind.

Such strategies mark a major shift from the model of exhibition practice—and the corresponding artistic attitude—that dominated the Indian scenario between 1947 and 2000. In that period of self-conscious modernism and gradual postmodernist exploration, the relationship between artists and viewers was tense, with the artist standing aloof and presenting the art work as a finished image, with a take-it-or-leave-it air. Indian art has now become far more willing to engage with its viewers, even in its most enigmatic or ludic avatars.

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Published: 25 Dec 2009, 09:50 PM IST
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