curated by Yashodhara Dalmia

KARL ANTAO, SHEBA CHHACHHI, PROBIR GUPTA, SHILPA GUPTA, RIYAS KOMU, NATARAJ SHARMA

8 May – 8 July 2008
Mon–Fri 11.00-19.00
Saturday by appointment

Catalogue curated by Yashodhara Dalmia,
published by Galleria Paolo Curti/Annamaria Gambuzzi & Co.
24 pages, 12 colours illustrations, 20 in black and white.

Contemporary art in India is inventive, sharp edged and at the same time lyrical. It has emerged from religious, courtly and artisanal practises embedded in everyday life of the people. Young Indian artists, in this show curated by the art historian Yashodhara Dalmia, as elsewhere, draw from this ambient tradition as well as international practises to create works in diverse mediums.

In reflecting their own tech-savvy, fast changing society, rapid urbanization and seamless traversions but also critiquing the politics and corruption of governance, the dirt in the corners of glittering buildings, the existence of poverty and shanty towns, contemporary art in India is macabre, cutting edge, playful and sometimes anguished. It has in skilled ways, using painterly, found and re-cycled material created new epiphanies which conjunct with indigenous contours.

In the exhibition India Time six artists reveal the accelerated pace of change in their society as well as its seamy side. The show, consisting of three painters, a video artist, a sculptor, and a photographer underlines this Janus faced reality where the crescendo of movement in India is also accompanied by pockets of decay and degeneration.

In the show the artist Nataraj Sharma reveals an itinerant state of affairs where the airplane, a symbol of an existence which is constantly on the move, can also lie in death-like stupor. The silvery grey sleekness of its metallic body creeps reptile like, captive to its own body. If in earlier works the airplane regurgitated its own image, predatory and obliterating, its presence here is static and still within a distantly glimmering horizon. Nataraj’s expanding oeuvre has dealt with the interconnectedness of man, machine and nature, of towering cities beset with bestiality and of horizons of breathtaking beauty which are also riddled with sulphurous pollution and other man made disasters. In his recent works an ominous note of militaristic invasions threatens to deface natural phenomena. It was when he witnessed an air show by the Indian Air Force in 2004 in his home city of Baroda that he envisaged the sky filled with a growing blanket of insects. From here, motion and passivity, villainous and human, the larger intrusions and constricted resting places come into play in his work. Overlaid with images of large scale deaths and riots in Gujarat where many from the minority community were killed in 2002, his propelling force has been the plenitude of natural splendour and its speedy overtaking by man made disasters. Based in Vadodara and Goa, Sharma has several international shows to his credit and a rich repertoire of painterly mediums.

Probir Gupta’s large canvas witnesses the crush of civilizations in metallic colours as the long shadow cast by the British colonial presence in India coalesces with super power manipulations in the present to emit the anguish of individuals. The free floating Persian calligraphic script, creates an elegiac sorrow and despair which form a continuous procession of the present.In an apocalyptic note, the swarm of humanity and metallic emissions jostle with each other without redemption.
Gupta’s text has consisted of malformed and mutated humans doomed beyond repair as a tragic aftermath of global misdeeds. The dark sludge, ever spewing, has threatened to flood his spaces,such as his earlier works where the poster image of idyllic Kashmir is riddled with amputated limbs as markers of landmines. His energetic scrutiny of these dark interpolations, however, perpetually places him beyond the fence in the terrain of the 'other'. The painter and installation artist trained at Ecole Nationale Superieure Des Beaux Arts works from New Delhi.

In recent years the artist and sculptor Riyas Komu has reinterpreted portraiture passing seamlessly from the cinematic and photographic to the painted image. He has at the same time garnered Islam to Communism and Gandhian beliefs, a heady mix of which his father practised, to create the emotional climate of his subjects. Thus he made hand painted stills of the woman in the hijab drawn from Jaffar Panahi’s Iranian film The Circle to scrutinize her anxious frame, threatened from the external world. In the two distilled portraits in this show we have a woman without the purdah but yet isolated from the world by an invisible veil and drawn into herself in a brooding sadness. As a Muslim, belonging to a minority community in India, Komu has often found himself in a double bind: on the one hand the subject of an upsurge of communal tension experienced in the metropolitan city of Mumbai where he lives. On the other, he also articulates the pressures of radical Islam which have turned many in his home town towards Jehad. His hall of portraits, however, culled from the deluge of mass media, have included the dispossessed, the homeless, the marginalized ,from the migrant labourer to the footballer, who have found shelter and evoked an intense scrutiny. If these are victims of historical circumstances they are also survivors of their predicament and are shown in their dual identity as systematic citizens of an increasingly wider world order.
Komu who is both a painter and a sculptor exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2007.

Shilpa Gupta’s video installations reverberate with everyday culture which reveals sinister undertones beneath outward sheens of normality. In the work in the show the ceiling becomes a site for viewing the clock tower a remnant of 19th century British colonial architecture which is a hall mark of Mumbai city where she resides. The city, known for its metropolitan character, has figures swooping in from the periphery which are hooded like monks but in army fatigues. The subaltern nature of the work is underlined by the fact that the expanding and contracting jewel like pattern on the ceiling is actually denoting transgressive acts. Gupta whose cutting edge video projections are interactive works where the viewer is also the participant has often relayed the suppressed and subversive reality of the persona.

The ageing woman’s body is the subject of the photographer and installation artist Sheba Chhachhi’s works of great poignancy. Contrary to conventional beliefs, the sensuality of the ageing woman in all its wrinkled and folded flesh, is explored. These are part of her ongoing photographic project which seeks to recuperate the female body from the dominant social, market and mediatic representations. According to the artist, based in New Delhi, these photos were made in collaboration with the subject, inviting the viewer to enter an intimacy that is not voyeuristic.

In Karl Antao’s epiphanic sculpture we have an expansive feeling of life moving outwards to encapsulate other notions of reality. If the winged bird enters newer zones there is an attitudinal move towards natural formations. The hieratic figure is emblematic of antiquity and its looming presence in the future. This rapturous description, however, is ruptured by its mummy like trance which holds the figure in captivity. If his sculptures have a fantastical quality about them with fishes metamorphosing out of human heads or creepers growing out of people’s bodies, they are also rooted in ground reality. Based in the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat known for its constant recurrence of communal violence, Antao’s wooden statue is an indictment of an increasingly stark reality where existence is a metaphoric nightmare. For the artist and the bystander the combat is not physical but by reflective and cultural means.

The diverse works of these artists bring together various facets of expression in a multi- layered society. They cover the entire gamut from new media art to photographs and expressions in paint relaying images of pluralistic life. In sum they articulate the diverse reality of a country which is forging ahead and also retains its archaic traditions weaving a dissonant and at the same time rich tapestry of life.