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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Art | Vanishing cities
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Art | Vanishing cities

The winners of 2011 FICA Emerging Artist Award document changing urban geographies in their art

A painting by Sujith S.N.Premium
A painting by Sujith S.N.

“A city makes its people as much as people make their cities," says artist Sujith S.N. of his work, titled cryptically, but with a touch of sarcasm, Psalms of an Invisible River, on display at Vadehra Art Gallery (VAG) in New Delhi’s Defence Colony.

Co-winner of the 2011 Emerging Artist Award, bestowed by the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), Sujith’s collection of watercolours are overwhelming, as much for their subject matter as their sheer scale. A solitary figure, trailed by a snaking line of birds, tumbles out of dizzy heights and hurtles headlong into an abyss. A silent march of the destitute moves through a polluted red haze. Tiny people float in a sea of liquid gold with no trace of an anchor in sight. Sujith’s paintings have the quality of parables.

“My work is inspired by the ways in which urban architecture regulates the life of citizens," says the artist. This cut-and-dried summary is turned into something rich and strange by his gift for introducing carefully calibrated affect into his work.

View Full Image
A work by Charmi Gada Shah

“Although my work draws on what I witnessed in my own locality, it could refer to any city in any part of the world," says Shah.

The Emerging Artist Award was instituted by FICA in 2007 to promote excellence among a new generation of artists, to be chosen by an independent jury every year. Some of its previous winners—Rakhi Peswani, Shreyas Karle, Hemali Bhuta and Paribartana Mohanty—are now names to reckon with in their chosen fields. Sujith and Charmi were elected for their distinctive approaches to conceptual art by a jury that included artist Bharti Kher, photographer Sunil Gupta and curator Gayatri Sinha in 2011. The outcome of the award was a year-long residency, followed by an opportunity to show their work at an exhibition at VAG.

Sujith, who was born in Kerala and has lived in Mumbai and Hyderabad, began his staggering paintings with a simple line of enquiry: “What are the historical conditions that make a space urban in a particular historical situation?" He went on to explore how these conditions alter over time, and the effect these changes have on the psyche of the people who have to live through such evolutions.

Lyrical and dark, Sujith’s paintings depict dramatic, even apocalyptic, visions of humanity being engulfed in a doomsday mist. Although spectacular, their appeal goes beyond the visual and hits somewhere deep down. This is art that grows on the viewer with time, building up a structure of feelings, desires and memories with repeated viewing. They allude to murals, religious and secular iconography, to retributions and revolutions.

Shah’s installations, which can be imagined as “architectural sculptures", are models of ruined houses in miniature. These are disturbingly life-like replica, not twisted and transformed into artful shapes (as Louise Bourgeois did, for instance, in some of her sculptures and drawings referring to the architecture of New York City). Standing amid rubble, ceilings gone, walls crumbling, and doors hanging loose, Shah’s shrunken buildings are but ghosts of their earlier selves.

Hollowed out, divested of their human associations but filled with a spirit of gravitas, her painstaking reconstruction of the relics of colonial mansions document, clinically and faithfully, the remains of a vanishing way of life. So it seems but natural, if not inevitable, that salvaged tiles and wood from these sites of destruction should find their way into her work.

Underlying this obvious nostalgia for an irretrievable past, there is, in Shah’s work, an abiding melancholy, a wistfulness inspired by a glimpse into the pity of things, as well as a subtle indictment of the modern mind. As a famous architect once put it: “A city without old buildings is like a man without a memory."

Neighbourhood Souvenirs and Psalms of an Invisible River are on from 11am-7pm (Sundays closed) till 12 September, at Vadehra Art Gallery, D-53, Defence Colony, New Delhi.

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Published: 24 Aug 2013, 12:06 AM IST
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