The Rise of the BROWNationals presents to the public a sculptural invocation-both organic and digital, of the sensory life in our unconscious of the area in Delhi consisting of the space bounded by the India Gate, Rashtrapati Bhavan and the Parliament House. The show follows up from Vishal K Dar’s 2010 show BROWNation at Gallery Espace, New Delhi. The 2010 show was itself a continuation of early mediations on the idea of the BROWNation in Dar’s work at a KHOJ Residency of 2009 and a group show he curated in 2007. In short, Dar’s BROWNation is an artistic meditation on life in India, a nation peopled by brown-skinned bodies. The present show returns with new meditations on how the intrinsic tenor of BROWNational life of India provides the occasion to imagine new dimensions of the public unconscious in the digital age.

The show is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek take on the possibilities of a future public art for Indian lifescapes, a ‘hoax’ of sorts. Digital flexibility allowed us to put up fragile Pop Culture effigies in the place of the solid monumentalism of national public art. The effigies mimicked this monumental up to a point but also hoaxed it by content completely at odds with the sacral and serious import of such monumentalism. Yet we hope that the ‘hoax’ that we have produced still falls within the domain of art. We have throughout attempted to seek out the edges of art in an interface with popular culture and in that our project goes back to invoke monumental public art of an earlier modernist era as well as Pop public art of contemporary times. With the mounumentalism of earlier public art the show shares the framework of ‘the people’, the BROWNationals, and with Pop Art it shares the wisdom of organic life being messy and unmindful of modernist disciplinary grids that seek to rein in the senses into heroic postures of labour and rebellion. It is probably the contradictory nature of Indian public culture, both heroic and bizarrely unruly, that allows for an unlikely reconciliation of registers of public art.

In The Rise of the BROWNationals Dar and his collaborators posit that the chaotic and excitable modernization of India with all its moral and ethical contradictions in place has forever produced a displacement of the senses. The space bounded by the official residence of the President of Republican India, the houses of Parliament and the monumental memorial to the nation’s defence personnel abounds in the ironies of Indian public life in ways that probably no other space in India does. It is the seat of national power, where the Republic of India celebrates its foundational moment every year in a pageant that promises flowers and bloodshed in equal measures. But it is also a space where monkeys replicate exponentially, where corruption is rampant and where lie hidden a million revolutions of BROWNation dreamt up but seldom carried out. It is a space where money speaks in vulgar ways while trying to maintain a façade of high-minded classical idealism. Meanwhile, this cat-and-mouse game between stated ideal and reality is surreally interspersed with the simplicity of Indian middle and underclass lives that every evening mill around in homely woolens and lick local brands of ice-cream. Media-driven consumerist behaviour in the space has made the cultural chaos more fantastic and confusing.

What we thus get is a space of parallaxes created by the overlapping emotional spaces that our media and technology-driven lives place us in. Things that earlier belonged to a particular cell in the Great Indian Grid of social and cultural difference are now cheek-by-jowl driven into each others’ arms by the techniques of development. We are prone to reveries, unwitting flights of imagery between scenes, between layers of memory, in the speeds and confusions of media noise. Contemporary India seems to be prone to ‘visionary parallaxes’, part kitsch melodrama, part Apocalyptic, in the delirium of consumerism. The literally parallax-ridden atmosphere of the space we worked with is what inspired us to locate our parallaxes of the aesthetic unconscious of contemporary India here. Somehow we felt that the playful games of association and juxtapositions we were engaged in would find an apt home here.

Image: © Vishal K Dar, Gallery Chemould