Adventures of the Select Seven

Curator Shaheen Merali brings together seven artists who use different media to expose the ugly truth of life.

Seven artists, each occupying their own space in the art world, showcase their creations according to their beliefs. Video installations, ink-jet painting, oil on wood, black-and-white drawings and a Gandhi figurine reflected in mirrors. They’ve been brought together in a creation titled Cinema Verite Redux by Berlin-based curator and writer Shaheen Merali.

Merali thought of bringing a select seven under the concept cinema verité, whose literal translation from Russian kinopravda means film-truth. This term was originally coined by Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov in the 1920s. It is now used to describe the documentary filmmaking style that emerged in the 1960s, in large part thanks to the technical innovations that freed the camera from its cumbersome accoutrements of the past.

“The cinéma-vérité movement of the 1960s distinguished itself from earlier approaches to documentary film through its use of handheld cameras and synchronous sound, its formal innovation and its sense of spontaneity.” Merali says he started to group artists who responded to this concept.

And Redux is the product. “Artists now, unlike before, love experimenting with ideas and processes and materials, so it is no longer surprising to find an artist making work in different media or even subject matters. It is, if anything, very natural now.’’

These seven artists have produced their works as notations of salvation, a clear ground for recovering informed ideas and a commitment within the aesthetic and political intimacy of their belief. Cinema Verite Redux allows a different artistic method, and, therefore, arguably a different result for art in its inscription and embedment into its visual surfaces.

It is set to bleed any environmentalist’s heart. Thirty years ago, when the Brazilian government okayed the construction of the Balbina Hydroelectric Dam in the Amazonia region, a large part of the forest was flooded, forcing the Waimiri and Atroari tribes to move from their ancestral territories. Nijensohn, an Argentinian photographer and video artist, has captured the tensions of human existence here.

He is best known for paintings that depict exaggerated masculine figures, such as gay skinheads and military cadets (Military Series True North). His paintings frequently reference the historical compositions and themes of David and Carvaggio as well as the compositional devices of miniature painters of India (Of Monkeys and Men) and the Middle East.

This is about urban spaces and it took Roy two years to make. Apartment is an animation loosely inspired by Georges Perec’s 1978 novel La Vie Mode D’emploi, in which the author takes us through each room of an apartment building in Paris, following the pattern of the knight’s move in chess. Roy, like Perec, uses this structure to weave together intersecting images of indulgence and dreaming, chaos, illness and transgression. Wild plants and animals take over the slowly deteriorating rooms, and, indeed, the whole space seems to succumb to a mysterious virus.

Raghavan’s inspiration is Federico Fellini. He bought a video camera and began making low-budget ad films and the occasional documentary. In 2004, he started a film club, A:DOOR, ‘the world’s best movies, free’. This move marked a new beginning—designing posters based on his interpretations.

Subba Ghosh first started including photography as floating images juxtaposed in his paintings. This was followed by the inclusion of video, creating installations which reflected his concern with class structures and social disparities in India. In his works, he positions himself as ‘the other’.

Parvathi Nayar, who lives and works in Chennai, explores ideas of the daily narrative of our lives through fragmentary, familiar and unfamiliar perspectives. There’s an obsessive attention to technique, so that the subject of a work is both its content and manner in which the content is portrayed.

While on a stroll in Bangalore’s Sunday Market, Kashi found a small sculpture of Mahatma Gandhi. He bought it for Rs 10 and started exploring various ways of engaging it. He was always struck by Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon. In his work too, Kashi says, “Gandhi… is lost in a hall of mirrors. The ‘original’ Gandhi is nowhere to be found.”

Cinema Verite Redux shows at Gallery Sumukha, Bangalore, over 18–30 July.