Material Metaphors

CONSTRUCTS | Constructions’, an ongoing show at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Modern Art (KNMA), may seem to have picked for its title a subheading of the museum’s own inventory. But walk through the labyrinth display of over 80 works by 30 artists from across generations, and you realise the descriptive label is simply a foil for the complexity it encapsulates. A spare curatorial note pitches the show as a deeper interrogation of the urban condition, of built structures around us and psychological constructs in the everyday, yet makes no overt connections between the titular binary. The curator and museum director Roobina Karode does well to leave much to the viewer’s imagination.

‘Constructs | Constructions’ is an enlarged iteration of an earlier exhibition titled ‘Working Space’. The two shows have occupied interim phases between stellar retrospectives that KNMA has been hosting for the past few years. It seems part of the art museum’s modus operandi to periodically rotate and air parts of its collection, thus letting visitors relook at art works in its care. Such an exercise becomes an occasion for an art institute to overwhelm the narrative of its collection’s worth with that of its value as it seeks relevance for art within its larger community.

There is a whiff of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space in the show’s curatorial proposal. For Bachelard, a house can be imagined from inside only in fragments and is eventually a sum of the residents’ memories of these fragments, which add up to a ‘psychological construct of the everyday’. Another Bachelardian obsession in the show is the poetic image that the French philosopher defines as ‘a salience on the surface of the psyche’ and its materialisation through an intuitive skill to bring form and material together in a physical metaphor or nexus of ambiguities (as William Epson would describe a metaphor) that conceals as much as it reveals its constituent parts. It is this material imagination that ‘Constructs | Constructions’ celebrates.

The celebration begins on a quiet and ambivalent note with Manisha Parekh’s sculptural installation Murmur (2011). On a rust painted wall, spherical shells with three longitudes made with white-coloured jute fibre are arranged randomly in an amorphous shape. Parekh brings into contemporary sphere the Modernists’ obsession with the medium, perhaps an inheritance from her artist parents, Manu and Madhvi Parekh. From a distance, the installation appears as a rash on the wall: a primitive symbolic gesture or a futuristic trope?

After this cryptic introduction, the show tempts viewers with a deceptively direct treatment of the theme with Seher Shah’s Grid Corridor (2013), an exquisitely detailed, large graphite-on- paper drawing of a high-tech building’s corner elevation suspended within an implied grid. Caught in a whirl of dynamic curved lines, each surrounded by its vortex, the building appears to be either fragmenting or being put together brick-by-brick—in any case, guided by the logic of the grid—by this malevolent/benevolent tempest. The drawing itself seems to be a work in progress. Shah, a trained architect, appears to be critiquing both her own medium and the more utile demands on it, just as she seems to be questioning the very basis of contemporary architecture—the severe rationality its grid imposes on public spaces.

In Dayanita Singh’s Museums of Vitrines (2013), the space-history thread thickens and entwines itself with two others that already run through Singh’s works: archives and space. Her interest is not in the historical or material value of things, but the space in and around the glass cases—the space she believes to be sentient—and her camera lingers to capture this living, breathing presence that is an eyewitness, an eavesdropper, a recording angel, if not mute then certainly reticent. LN Tallur, the South Korea- based Indian sculptor and installation artist, makes these very ghosts visible in his Veni, Vidi, Vici (‘I came, I saw, I conquered’), which gets a large room to itself and was first shown at Art Basel in 2013. Four inverted sections of a red-tiled roof are placed together to form a quadrilateral that one can enter. Balancing on these sloping roof sections are terracotta figurines of archetypal yogis in tortuous Hatha Yoga postures. Two hundred-odd years ago, missionaries from Basel set up a roof-tile factory in Karnataka—where Tallur is from— to provide jobs to their local converts. During World War II, the British took over the factory which had begun making ethnographic figurines for the Victoria and Albert Museum in Bombay (now the Bhau Daji Lad Museum). But the Empire is no more and yoga rules the world: loaded with ironies, the work seems to have been precipitated by history’s collision with its critical nemesis—the artist.

Lahore-born, New Delhi-based Masooma Syed’s dioramas are also literalised re-creations of historical and cultural entanglements, albeit in miniature. On display is her cheeky critique of history as an imperial construct that takes a cut-and-paste approach to create table-top, pop-up mise en scenes made of found images and everyday material, as in I Am Not From the North (2012), where a northern hemisphere cityscape re-creates a twisted ‘bonhomie’ of the Empire. Masooma’s piquant postmodernism gains a neurotic edge in New York- based Yamini Nayar’s kaleidoscopic photographic abstractions of urban spaces. Nayar’s enigmatic practice is cross-pollination among many other art forms like sculpture, painting, performance and collage, enabled through photography. She often constructs assemblages with found material and records them before destroying them. Nayar’s representations attempt to capture the experience of a space. Traces I, II, III and VI (2013), are black- and-white photographic mosaics of textured surfaces layered with a tangle of lines resembling collapsing scaffolding that complicate notions of perspective and confound easy comprehension of a space’s depth and scale. Gion (2014) is one among four cubist studies of enclosed spaces that are cinematic in their dynamism with jump cuts, repetition and then moments of intense concentration, all registers of time splayed on the flatness of a single photographic print.

Nayar’s detached abstractions segue into more sombre matters in the Australian artist of Indian origin Simryn Gill’s brooding series Eyes and Storms (2012), a set of three photographic prints showing aerial views, awash in subfusc light, of mines, water bodies and dams. The higher perspective renders intimate the humongous geographic and man-made features. Rather than locating herself within historical narratives, Gill seems to filter them through her own identity under construction. Her postcolonial consciousness confers on Gill the freedom to reimagine her identity as decoupled from a place and a history. Hence her insistence on a personal geography, just like her personal history, as seen in her earlier work My Own Private Angkor (2007-2009). Pooja Iranna makes similar claims on the Modern in her architectural models made of staple pins, Twisted Symphony (2008), Synchronisation Under Progress (2014) and Confluence (2008). In a similar vein, the Rawalpindi-born, Bangaluru- based Mariam Suhail’s set of four drawings on paper from her Partial Views series (2013) is used as a springboard to Modernity. The clean lines, economy and extreme perspectives are used to transform humdrum domestic spaces into slick geometric abstractions.

In contrast to the contemporary precision stands Paris-based Keralite artist Velu Viswanadhan’s primitive pigment- on-paper drawings with their fuzzy grids signalling his affinity to the metaphysical—an attempt to seek a softer, spiritual identity like his peers VS Gaitonde and Nasreen Mohamedi did. The Moderns like FN Souza, SH Raza and Ram Kumar, with their enlarged notion of identity, projected individual subjectivities on public spaces that became part of their personal histories. The postmodernist literally opened spaces within spaces for a fuller play of their provincial identities within a national identity: consider KG Subramanyan’s elaborate narrative paintings and Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh’s Kavaad: Travelling Shrine: Home (2008) which opens into is a multipanel installation- cum-painting that can be folded into a book-like object. Another branch of Moderns, the ‘Group 1890’ artists find resonance for their concept of space and construction in Vedic stipulations for the construction of sacrificial altars or the ghoulish city plans of Yama’s kingdom in the Garuda Puran: consider Himmat Shah’s atavistic casts for the magnificent high relief mural in St Xavier’s Primary School in Ahmedabad (1968-69) or Jeram Patel’s ritualistic burnt wood and metal works.

The contemporary artist mines urban existence for metaphors. Hema Upadhyay’s stunning recreation of an aerial view of Dharavi in 8’ x 12’, Nataraj Sharma’s large-scale metal sculpture of an under-construction high-rise block and related etchings, Srinivas Prasad’s low-tech pastoral installation of a commodious and airy bamboo house, Nandita Kumar’s hi- tech pastoral trapped in impossible bottles, Anish Kapoor’s materialisation of the poetic idea, ‘the salience on the surface of the psyche’ in In Mind, Tushar Joag’s homemade robots, and Gigi Scaria’s metaphor for material aspirations and social mobility in Elevator of the Subcontinent (2011) add to the spectacle. Sudarshan Shetty’s untitled carpet finely carved out of reclaimed wood with a hint of an undefined presence beneath it, and Sumedh Rajendran’s recent grill work Humid Distance, a profile of a pigeon made of steel and mounted with frosted glass, both start as explorations of vernacular aesthetics—the ubiquitous carpet and grills in Indian homes. Yet both seem to have transmogrified into material reality a poetic image that flashed between their brain cells’ synapses, a fleeting nexus of ambiguities. Their material metaphors constantly play on many immanent yet elusive associations around home and space.

(‘Constructs | Constructions’ is on view till 20 December 2015 at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. Hemant Sareen is a Delhi-based art critic)

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Hemant Sareen