BackCalendar | Making sense of the contemporary
Calendar | Making sense of the contemporary
PremiumFree falling: Praneet Soi’s Juggernaut-3 appears to be floating.
Out of Balance
The word “astaticism" suggests instability; the loss of equilibrium. This exhibition will make you want to hold on to the walls: Larger-than-life human faces, limbs, entire bodies, animals and furniture float around you when you visit Notes on Astaticism, Praneet Soi’s ongoing solo exhibition at the Vadehra Art Gallery.
Soi is an alumnus of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, the University of California at San Diego and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. He works in a range of media, including painting, drawing, collage text and audio-visual assemblages.
Notes on Astaticism begs for a visit to Vadehra Art Gallery’s third and latest exhibition space (this is the second exhibition since it opened in October). The works are spread over three floors. On the ground floor are his large-scale drawings, including the spectacular Juggernaut-3 which has an 8ft-high cobalt blue figure hurtling across the canvas.
On the first floor, among other exhibits, is Kumartuli Printer- Notes on Labour, a projection of 75 slides which show a printer at work. This slide show (which was part of the biennale) is a critique of the Western representation of labour. Soi shows the loving but painstaking processes at work as his subject, a printer from Kumartuli, a suburb of north Kolkata, goes around his work. “He defies the condescending view we have of manual labour," says Soi, over the phone from Kolkata. This is labour, but it is also art.
On the top floor is an interactive installation. Soi has put up two mobile “astatic machines", through which the public—take your children along—can actively participate in a dialogue with the artist. The “machines" are actually slide projectors on wheels. Soi provides a few hundred transparencies that you can place any way you desire under the projectors to create a do it yourself “astatic artwork". Drive the machines around to distort, stretch or magnify the images. There’s a wide range of visuals to choose from: The slides go from esoteric human figures to dollar notes to a printout of the cover of the book Towards a New Architecture by Le Corbusier.
Be forewarned: You might lose your sense of gravity while walking through these rooms.
Notes on Astaticism is on exhibit at the Vadehra Art Gallery, D-53 Defence Colony, New Delhi, till 24 December.
Anindita Ghose
*****
Melancholic aftertaste
“I relate very strongly to Jeet (Thayil)’s poetry. Especially the manner in which he is able to strike a deep melancholic note, like a dhrupad maestro," says curator Nancy Adajania, explaining why the first line of his poem After spawned the exhibition, Your Name Is Different There.
The five key figures are drawn from Thayil’s poem: the activist, the bairagi, or renunciate, the marginal or the tramp, the one who has witnessed violence, and the neighbour. None of the identities of these survivor figures are watertight, sometimes merging into each other.
Thus the historical narrative of the Shoah, the Holocaust (Kaleka’s Consider) is counterpointed with that of the Nakba, the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland by the Jews (CAMP’s Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar/The Neighbour Before the House). In Khurana’s Tramping, a tramp-flâneur meets a real beggar; Chhachhi’s women ascetics cross paths with Khurana’s Flower carrier, where the only focus of meditation against the ugliness of the world is a flower.
Adajania says she does not think in binaries. Instead she is interested in a distributed sense of belonging. “These works allow us to experience the fact that displacement and belonging are a ratio, not an either/or," she explains. The ratio changes from moment to moment and place to place. It defines how you live and what you call yourself. Or what others call you.
Your Name Is Different There is on exhibit at the Volte Gallery, Colaba, Mumbai, till 5 January.
Gayatri Jayaraman
*****
Without a word
In playing out a lipogram, the French novelist Georges Perec wrote an entire novel, La Disparition (1969), without using the letter “e". His protagonist, Anton Vowl, cannot sleep until he discovers a missing link.
It is a similar quandary that Words: A User’s Manual, a group show curated by Himali Singh Soin, sets out to address. In this brilliantly put together group exhibition, Soin, a writer herself, elevates text from its mundane functionality to become the artwork.
Kureshi’s four-panelled Flux machine is constantly changing, tricking the viewer as it does. An array of four-letter words show up, from “cure" to “pose" to “fare", ridding the words and the objects they stand for of any meaning. Banerjee’s drawings of memories of lost objects, I Lost My Wedding Ring Behind Harrod’s, is the show’s pièce de résistance. He and Soin asked their friends to respond with the memory of a lost object. Twenty-two such written testimonials are on exhibit—from lost cardigans to lost lovers—with Banerjee’s illustrations accompanying them. Raqs Media Collective’s The Philosophy of the Namak Haram makes a silent statement. The installation is a reading room with books filled with the “unwritten word". But the books don’t really exist (only a photograph of them does).
The wall texts are an intrinsic part of the exhibition experience. Like for the Flux machine, Soin writes: “Your timing is perfect: everything is about to change..."
Perec watches over the exhibition like a guardian angel—with his novel A Void, the English translation of La Disparition, on display. The madcap novelist applied a list of constraints to try and contain life within the novel form. And Soin takes her clues from him.
Words: A User’s Manual will be on exhibit at Exhibit 320, Lado Sarai, New Delhi, till 24 December.
Anindita Ghose
*****
Letters on the floor
Sudarshan Shetty’s latest solo exhibition at GallerySKE, Listen Outside This House, is constructed around words too. Written by Shetty, the fictive texts are rooted in his own past and context. These pithy narratives are the starting point from where he begins an evocation of objects.
Listen Outside This House will be on exhibit at GallerySKE, Langford Town, Bangalore, from 19 December-28 January.
Anindita Ghose
*****
Confession box
American photographer Waswo X. Waswo’s quirky exhibition, Confessions of an Evil Orientalist, walks between personal revelation and inspired fantasy, asking who is the “outsider" and who “belongs".
Confessions of an Evil Orientalist will be on exhibit till 12 January at Gallery Espace, New Friends Colony, New Delhi.
Anindita Ghose
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