Meenakshi Thirukode

Tanya Goel’s artistic occupation and the context built around her work over the years have been rooted in her articulation of the city and its surfaces predominantly through painting. In her recent solo at Galerie Mirchandani and Steinrucke, Goel re-iterates and shifts her position on these ideas by employing subtle, definite degrees of sensitivity and simultaneity to meaning, process, perception and form in unexpected ways.

‘In The Garden’ brings together a new body of work by Sumakshi Singh that continues an exploration of similar ideas situated in the way we experience reality and consciousness in their varied relations within both the impalpable and observable worlds. Singh creates immersive mixed media installations using embroidered fabric and stop motion animation, layered lace drawings and paintings as possible axiomatic 'portals' that allow us to understand our physical body and its psychological and existential interdependence on cognitive limitations. In particular Singh focuses on the garden as one such gateway. The garden through history, mythology, pietism and philosophy has given us ways to understand our own inner literal and metaphysical truths. Singh uses the many forms of the garden, within the space of art, as a means of discovery for herself and her viewers.

Curated by Meenakshi Thirukode, ‘Material Ruptures’ is an exhibition featuring the works of artists Kumaresan Selvaraj, Manisha Parekh, Rathin Barman and Sachin George Sebastian. The show explores how small fractures in seemingly homogenous surfaces can disrupt, reveal, or reconfigure new poetic ways of seeing. Be it a monument, an urban landscape, parts of an edifice or a medium in its elemental form, each artists work in the exhibition elicits a language of “relation” where meanings are imagined by way of diverse multiplicities rather than by a fixed totality. Ruptures reveal surfaces as an accumulation of material experiences, a visceral means through which we encounter the unseen and untold.

An unpublished review of Art Dubai 2015.
"Developing a cultural identity within the region of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East is a process in flux, offering the potential for what are seemingly fixed art world systems to operate more organically and perhaps intuitively. Art Fairs which are predominantly about sales and the market also invariably play a substantial role within the region in providing a platform for critical discourse. Ofcourse the question is whether the addition of educational and off site non-profit based projects are mere lip service, or if it truly does push the edge a little."

Our present is immersed in a giddy state of self-absorption and imbalance, where one hopes not to fall off the edge. In this world, “stillness”—in terms of geography, thought and being—is a position of privilege, and one that is acutely sentient. Such a space, both literally and metaphorically, can be entered through the many chapters of Alwar Balasubramaniam (Bala)’s artistic practice. His solo show, “Layers of Wind, Lines of Time,” at Talwar Gallery in New Delhi, functions essentially as a conduit into a larger narrative that Bala has been constructing over the years in his works. In what is seemingly an object-based practice, Bala’s strength lies in the materiality of his pieces. His process and ethos is the closest thing we have to the notion of gesture as “language.” His is a practice that makes us acutely conscious of the imperceptible—it is not so much a revelation as it is a reminder of how frayed our sense of perception is.

There has been a tendency, in recent times, for political art to be presented through a market centric context. Any piece of cultural production that confronts the failure of the establishment is often sold as a neat idea of political rebellion that's just the right amount of provocative. Making work that addresses rampant human injustice in the way Indian labourers are treated in the Gulf and then having your “political” work in the context of The Dubai Art Fair becomes self-serving, especially when done within the boundaries of the art world. Outside of this boundary, artists, activists and social entrepreneurs work at a grassroots level, where success isn't immediate and the interest isn't fleeting.

“Cloud Gate” encompasses a space that is both material and spiritual at a level beyond the immediate comprehension of the viewer. Kapoor talks of this experience as being “a direct attribute of the sublime”, a description he made of another massive work, “Marsyas”, which was constructed at the Tate a year earlier. While it is impossible for the viewer to grasp the entirety of “Marsyas”, he experiences the “modern sublime” as a comprehensive whole when he stands in front of “Cloud Gate”. On its surface the viewer sees the reflection of the phallic skyline, the clouds above and himself; as if the sky, earth and the human soul have been conjoined in a transcendent communion. This experience takes place due to the placement of the sculpture in front of the towering buildings that run across Chicago’s skyline. These attributes associated with “Cloud Gate” make it the most profound manifestation of a highly evolved contemporary icon that Kapoor has created by constantly questioning and discovering the symbolism of traditional Shaivaite iconography throughout his career.

While specific interpretations are often avoided by most critics, the significant point is that a work of art can have definite sources of influence and yet connect to its viewer regardless of their social, political or cultural conditioning. What is ultimately pertinent is the object of art itself, that is, the physical or intellectual embodiment of the artist’s vision and intent, and how it relates to the individual who engages with it. However, when it comes to art historical contextualisation of non-Western art gets complex. Anish Kapoor serves as a perfect example.

We are at a point in contemporary cultural practice where the ‘Global Contemporary’ needs to be re-imagined. And one would argue that this starts with rethinking artistic practice and the artist as an individual. The framework to begin this lies in a singular and ubiquitous idea – travel and more importantly, ‘travel as metaphor’, to borrow the title of a book by Georges Van Den Abbeele.  Abbeele presents a series of readings that examines the figure of travel in the writings of Montaigne, Descartes, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. He argues that “each writer’s discourse allows for the elaboration of a metadiscourse opening onto the deconstruction of the writers claims to a certain property (of his home, of his body, of his text, of his name)” (Abbeele 38)1. Now, travel as metaphor exists within two very distinct art histories – one being stagnant, visible, dominant, gender-defined and white, as embodied for example in Gauguin’s ‘Primitivism’. The second strain is invisible, in exile, transient, genderless and the ‘Other’, seen through artistic practices like that of Ana Mendieta. It is within the latter that one would situate the work of Firoz Mahmud.

The term ‘civilization’ itself is rooted in a very specific binary within the prevailing Historical narrative. It places the colonizer as the harbinger of a systematized state. And by default the colonized or the Other must function in the space that implicitly embodies the percept of ‘natural’, úntouched’, raw and therefore the romanticized Preserver. Charles Mann evolves that idea further to remind us of, even re-imagine, these ideas by placing the characteristic of the species as an entity. Humankind is implicitly hierarchical, so that there are/were always those who dominate and those who are/will be oppressed. Nature, and its resources are ‘currency’ within these systems, used as a means to yield Power – and in it lies our ultimate fate alongwith that of the planet. Fast forward to our present time, and we find ourselves in the narrative of the Anthropocene that provides a framework, which decidedly places “the collective actions”  of Man - our species as a whole – as the central figure influencing our planet at every level. The most talked of aspect is our role in climate change. However the legacy we will leave behind includes innumerable changes including “nutrients from fertilizers wash[ing] off fields and down rivers, creating stretches of sea where nothing grows except vast algal blooms, deforestation means vast quantities of soil being eroded and swept away. Rich grasslands are turning to desert; ancient ice formations are melting away; species everywhere are vanishing.”  It is in these layered contexts around the relationship between Man and Planet that we begin to understand the complexity of Vibha Galhotra’s artistic practice.

Mariam Ghani’s work locates her enquiries within art as a ‘place’ to navigate and re-construct multiple intersections of histories, images and the inherent collective consciousness held in memories. Ghani’s work as an Afghan American artist uses a multi-disciplinary “lens” as a way to think through some of the questions on the transient nature of identities. Working between a post-conflict Afghanistan and a post 9/11 United States, ‘futures’ are often manipulated – “truths” bear the burden of a dominant white hegemonic narrative. Ghani explores alternatives both through the phenomenological relationship of body and site as well as the construction of a re-imagined future, stemming from lost, erased and invisible histories.