Something fantastic, something out-of-the-ordinary will strike our mundane existence this year end. It might be ‘too strange to believe’ that a mammoth event of international standards - that includes in its gamut video art, painting, photography, site-specific installations, performance art and sculpture - is all set to cast its ‘magical’ yet ‘real’ spell on Delhi! Blurring the defining lines between real and unreal, Gallery Espace chooses famous German art critic Franz Roh’s depiction of reality in art as the theme for its 20th anniversary celebration art show. Magic Realism! Roh described it as a form in which “our real world re-emerges before our eyes, bathed in the clarity of a new day”.
To be held at Lalit Kala Akademi from December 9-18, the show aptly named, Lo Real Maravilloso: Marvelous Reality is rooted in the theme of magic realism and draws inspiration from sources as diverse as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Laura Esquivel, Salman Rushdie, Joanne Harrism, Mikhail Bulgakov, Milan Kundera and Louis de Bernieres.
Being held to commemorate 20 path-breaking years of the gallery during which it launched artists like Subodh Gupta, G.R Iranna, Manjunath Kamath, Tanmoy Samanta and Ashim Purkayastha who are today celebrated and internationally acclaimed for their innovative art practices, this unprecedented event has been conceptualised by Delhi based journalist/filmmaker/curator Sunil Mehra and will also witness parallel events like curatorial walks, artists talks, slide shows et al in what is perhaps the first such private initiative of this magnitude.
Here’s one art gallery that has braved the economic slump to give to art aficionados an art exhibition that showcases a wide spectrum of art practices including painting, sculpture, video art and installation, performance installation as also photography and digital art, to establish the organic connectivity of diverse art forms.
Destroying the lines of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic, the artist, write, painter, performer is the archetypal insider/outsider: what he can communicate is his/her own perception of reality.
Marvelous Reality ...
And Reality is a fascinating palimpsest of myth, mind and memory where artists play freely with medium, form and content to set out on a journey of the imagination.
Thirty-seven artists from all over the world - including painters, sculptors, performers, video artists and photographers - set out to discover a magical world in which the real and the imagined, the mythical and the metaphorical, the fact and fantasy merge seamlessly together. In the process, they create an extraordinary “Other World”, that Louis Carroll once evoked so beautifully in - "And what did they draw?" said Alice.
"Treacle... All manner of things- everything that begins with an M -... such as mousetraps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness...."
The exhibition include works by Amit Ambalal, Anandajit Ray, Anila Rubiku, Bandeep Singh, Baptist Coelho, Barbara Ellmerer, Bharti Kher, Bhupen Khakhar, Chintan Upadhyay, Desmond Lazaro, Dhruvi Acharya, Ebenezer Sunder Singh, Gargi Raina, Gigi Scaria, Iranna GR, Ishan Tankha, Jagannath Panda, Lavanya Mani, Louise Gardiner, Manjunath Kamath, Maxine Henryson, Michael Müller, Nikhil Chopra, Navtej Singh Johar, Parvaneh Etemadi, Pushpamala N, Ranbir Kaleka, Rina Banerjee, S. D. Hari Prasad Achari, Sheba Chhachhi, Shilpa Gupta, Sohrab Hura, Sonia Mehra Chawla, Sutapa Biswas, Tanmoy Samanta, Tara Sabharwal and Waswo X. Waswo
Renu Modi, Director, Gallery Espace says: “Since the time the gallery started in 1989, our USP has always been to put together highly specialized, medium based shows. Time and again, Espace has cut across boundaries by exhibiting works of different nationalities, genders and cultures. Espace has always tread the unconventional path and introduced to the Indian art market new genres like sculptures and drawings when they were relatively unknown mediums. It is apt, therefore, that Magic Realism is the theme of our 20th anniversary show and I am excited to show such a wide array of disciplines all under one roof.”
According to curator Sunil Mehra: “There seemed no room left for romance and imagination, for myth, memory and metaphor in art. Somewhere in the process of chasing concepts and making art that conforms to current fashionable cultural theorists’ constructs, we are losing out the critical ingredient of art, which is Magic, which is the untrammeled mind that inhabits multiple universes at the same time.”
The gallery began working on the show way back in early 2007 when curator Sunil Mehra touched base with around 28 artists worldwide “whose art practices and sensibilities would respond and react to the theme”. That list has now grown to include works of 37 artists amongst whom are internationally acclaimed names like Anila Rubiku from Albania, Sutapa Biswas from United Kingdom, Rina Banerjee from New York, Bharti Kher, Ranbir Kaleka, Chintan Upadhyay, Jagannath Panda, Manjunath Kamath and Shilpa Gupta among others.
Sunil Mehra is excited not only about the expanse of the show but also that he has been able to rope in Mark Prime (Mumbai-based British designer of Damien Hirst show design fame) to convert the three storeyed LKA into a space of real enchantment!
“His design sense is subtle and not gimmicky with a focus on being uncluttered,” says Mehra explaining what to expect from the show. So you would need to walk through a especially created ambience to come face-to-face with Waswo X Waswo’s hand-made Krishna image, or just gape at huge tree sculptures by Chintan Upadhyay which will be suspended from the ceiling. Manjunath Kamath’s life-size fire glass automobile wrenching white rabbits into exhaust fumes will share ceiling space with Chintan’s work while Baptist Coelho’s site-specific installation will witness shafts of air blowing an aeroplane in and out of its mouth. And wait there’s more. Shilpa Gupta’s interactive videowork is stunning: raise your hand and another hand from the sky will come to meet it; move forward and a hundred bird shadows will take flight as you advance while performance artist Nikhil Chopra’s ghost images make one wonder if there are any boundaries between the real and the fantastic.
The drama doesn’t end there. N. Pushpamala’s photographic work where she constantly plays the nayika combines the nuances of horror film genre, Parsi theatre and fairy tales while being replete with historical, social and political meanings. The relatively newbie in the show, Lavanya Mani from Baroda, combines multiple textures, meanings and art practices in her work which revolves around fabric, embroidery, paint, textile, vegetable dyes and text!
Artist Anila Rubiku will display two works; an installation titled Houses of the rising sun & four paintings in the series titled Daily Life. Says the artist: “The installation is made with a Plexiglass base that consists of 30 small house sculptures made of white card. Four walls are sewn on the outside with cotton thread to display the furnishings; the roof is perforated by a hole-punch; gaps in the four sides represent the doors and windows; some texts too have been sewn onto the doors and I have placed the source of light inside the sculpture so as to bring the feeling of hospitality and life expressed by a home. On the other hand my watercolour-based paintings are based on the daily life concept and what comes from life, expressed as a story tale, making it poetic and powerful.” Her other paintings include Being Afraid and Wishing the telephone rings.
Maxine Henryson creates sensual, poetic and spiritually motivated color photographs that trace evidence of divinity, rituals, memory and history in the West and the East. “My photographic works titled Table Set, Early Morning Light, Ghetto’s Gate, Dancer against cave wall, Two People, Monk Emerging and Marlene Dumas Exhibit revolves around using simple and archetypal characters like trees, rivers, clotheslines, women, children, temples, seasons, courtyards, flowers, gardens, curtains, vessels, fences, bedspreads and many more everyday objects,” says the artist.
Sutapa Biswas has been exploring the themes of time, history, gender, race and human condition through her works. Her strongly poetic and visually resonant works derive influences from a wide range of sources including film, art history, literature and psychoanalytic theory. Her drawings are evocative of her enquiry into the psyche of the feminine subject and the daily rituals of domestic life. In this show, her seminal film installation titled Birdsong, 2004 (colour, 16mm film transferred onto DVD, dual screen projection), is based on a conversation between the artist and her son who at eighteen months, expressed his desire to have a horse living in his living room, and, who is the central character within the film, the resulting installation works on multiple levels of almost Bunuelesque visual poetry. She spent considerable time building the details of the room in which the film was shot, visually drawing on George Stubbs’ painting, Lord Holland and Lord Albemarle, shooting at Goodwood, 1759, and referencing colour palettes as can be found in the English Heritage swatch paints. Biswas recalls that for her, these formal and aesthetic components presented a familiar context in which the central focus is the child’s dream, and the relationship between her son and herself. The film installation is an unsettling, yet beautiful work. As the curator and critic Guy Brett writes, ‘Biswas’ recent works is a device for awakening memory, gaining a foothold in the flux of time and conveying an insight into human lives’.
Barbara Ellmerer’s painting Rainbow Vision is about the hypnopompic (the state of consciousness leading out of sleep). Says the artist, “In my painting process, I try to grasp the wondrous things which I see in my dreamlike encounters without trying to hold on to them but rather letting them float. For example in the case of the plant, mushroom and insect paintings, the paintings become pasty, expressive and explosive. In the case of the ‘light’ paintings, to which the Rainbow Vision series belongs, it becomes fine, gentle and delicate. While painting, I move between different poles: between what I see in everyday life, in the media, and what is already present on the canvas before I start painting (the traditions and rationalities of painting); the paint that I can mix and apply; the movements that the colours and gestures trigger in me while I am painting and looking at the painted image from different distances.” Her work includes Boy girl, Irene, Indian Bride and Tabea under the title Rainbow Vision series.
Shilpa Gupta creates artwork using interactive video, websites, objects, photographs, sound and public performances to probe and examine subversively such themes as desire, religion, notions of security on the street and on the imagined border. In her interactive video projection titled Shadow 2, the viewer’s silhouette becomes integrated with the narrative in the projection when he/she walks in front of the projection via computer vision technology. The viewer witnesses waves being created, windows triggered open which bring in street and religious sounds from different parts of the world, birds flying over, a child dancing, houses falling etc.
Waswo X. Waswo latest projects have involved hand-coloured digital prints, made at his Udaipur studio in collaboration with traditional hand-colourist Rajesh Soni. He has also created a series of autobiographical miniature paintings in collaboration with miniaturist R. Vijay. He will showcase three hand painted black and white digital photographs along with a video under the title All I Want from one of his new series of photographs and video titled New Myths. He says, “My photographs are a collaboration between four people - the person who paints the backdrop, the model, the hand-colourist and myself. Most of my work is autobiographical as I always like to give my photograph a personal narrative or commentary on the human condition.”
Bharti Kher, well-known for her deeply personal, evocative and layered work, explores questions of identity, globalism and tradition. Her more recent works touch upon ideas surrounding the ‘mythic’ and frailties that lie within characters that straddle reality and otherness. In ‘Warrior with cloak and shield’, the artist tries to portray the domestic space that can be viewed as a place fraught with negotiations of emotions and placement. Says Bharti: “Over the years my work has looked at this microcosm of a space with honesty and exaggeration; horror and humour; sarcasm in its most brutal form, parody and metaphor. The series of women that have developed since 2004 are occupants of this space. They are sisters and goddesses, existing in a bizarre B-serial that turns their domestic space into a zoo of life. They are hybrid monsters that are portents for the future - they are you and me with all our frailty and awkwardness, our hunger and macabre. Warrior moves forward, a banana leaf barely covering her modesty as sheild, her armour a cloak (an un-ironed shirt). She moves forward but will never leave through the door. Her very strength and prowess, her magnificent horns reign her in, rendering her immobile. She’s moving, but physically going nowhere, holding in her hands instead the weight of her years and the wisdom that a great pair of shoes can make you feel like a warrior for a little while.”
Dhruvi Acharya paintings titled Mumbai City, Attack II, Crowd II, Elephanta II, Hump, Loadbearer, Morphosis I & II focus on the current world environment – on the pollution, the violence and the discord. Says the artist: “Just like me, my work is not overtly or obviously political, but instead of anger, I tend to utilize a subtle, dark and wry humour, drawing viewers into a world where thoughts are as visible as “reality” and where the protagonists live and metamorphose by the logic of that world. My paintings are based on my drawing books which are like a journal, a chronicle of my thoughts, observations, emotions and experiences. I am interested in creating paintings that have a smooth physical surface but are visually and psychologically layered too. My deep concern for the environment, my love for Indian miniatures, comic books and contemporary street art all have culminated into the current body of work.”
Ranbir Kaleka’s sculpture portrays a horse rider trying to light up his path by turning on the torch, but in a strange warping of the spectrum, the beam of light illuminates only the back of his own horse. The image suggests multiple metaphors: cyclicality, self-reflexivity, the ancient Ouroboros symbol of Serpent swallowing its own tail, the failure of systems, the necessity of illuminating the past before a movement forward and the futility of circular thinking.
Sohrab Hura collage of photographs titled Oasis is about his visit to Siem Reap, Cambodia over three years ago. Says the ace photographer: “I wanted to document the strange contradictions of a night in this erstwhile sleepy town through the perspective of a lonely outsider. Hence, the photographs represent a beautiful lady boy walking along the food street at night which is full of tourists all night, hoping to find a customer, street kids sleeping on the pavement near a famous all night bar, tired lady boy dancers in the lively Sok San Palace Dance Bar take a break after performing for the tourists who come there to drink, the red light district of Siem Reap, an empty butcher shop in the old market, a lone woman in an inebriated state sings in a street without life and an empty street at night in the old market that bustles with life during the day.” He organises a kind of tension, at the limit between documentary and fiction, where his perception is as important as what he represents. That’s why his grainy, textured, enigmatic pictures in black and white, in which framing organises the limits of a new world are built not on the basis of any information, but by a kind of necessity of sharing his emotions.
Some other works which will be on display are Performing Art I & II by GR Iranna; Superhero Junkyard & Superhero Junkyard 2 by Ishan Tankha; Hellsehen (Seibstaufnahme von Rangoon) – Fortune Teller, Nordziege & Science Fiction (Sakura) by Michael Muller; My Fish by SD Hari Prasad; The Wings, Vessel, Hello Love, The Ivory Comb, The Red Sofa, Lost Sanctuary, Armour & The Beast by Tanmoy Samanta.
Presented by
Renu Modi
Curated by
Sunil Mehra
