In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stopped Worrying and Love the Bomb, the ‘war room’ is where the top layer of governance gathers to decide (and then helplessly watch) the fate of the world.
In Wood from Ships, Nityan Unnikrishnan’s solo exhibit at Chatterjee and Lal, The War Room is a painting that replaces Kubrick’s round table with a dinner table occupied by a wealthy-seeming family at meal time, the screens are replaced by a frame containing a rural landscape, where folks are seemingly migrating against the backdrop of dwindling forest land and growing industry.
The table itself contains not food, but scenes from farms with men and women going about creating the nation’s food supply. Unnikrishnan clearly is not pulling any punches in this exhibition of paintings all derived from and commenting on the times we live in, with a series of “clues” painted on paper and khadi.
It’s a bit like reading the newspaper in 2016, via headlines. “I agree,” says Unnikrishnan. “News and events, and how they are delivered or made accessible is overwhelming and difficult to decipher. Often I cannot separate one event from another and it all becomes one large theatre,” says the artist.
Theatrical scenery
Theatre is one way to describe Unnikrishnan’s work in this show, which is often rooted in an expansive and slightly mad mise en scène with a complimentary helping of current events and pop culture. Works such as How to Make Friends and Influence Your Uncle and Monoliths present so much activity that you’re not sure where to look, and what to take in first. Both paintings (among others) present a world of elaborate settings: How to Make Friends… shows us a family gathering, Monoliths feels like a tourist destination, some sort of mangled seaside dream, where a photo booth stands empty amidst pieces of everything from the Delhi Metro to the proposed Sardar Patel statue in Gujarat.
According to Unnikrishnan, old photographs, letters, diaries, notebooks, journals, magazines and some historical material play an important role in his work. These objects “help consolidate [my] thoughts. They are like bus stops of the mind. Drawings, news items, or even drawing the newspaper itself does the same job, really.”
Many paintings are sprinkled with references from world history and art history: from classical Greek statues and snippets of Francis Bacon to Subodh Gupta’s implausible Ray (a nod to surrealism and Man Ray. Its inclusion possibly suggests an India that looks for home-grown greatness). “[Subodh] himself explains the grandness and theatre of [his work] so beautifully that I did not feel hesitant to go with it when I did,” says Unnikrishnan. Gupta, of course, is considered one of the country’s most successful artists, with his trademark steel vessel sculptures, and has been compared to artists such as Anish Kapoor and Damien Hirst.
Portraying people
Unnikrishnan uses Ray, a bucket emptying itself mid-air, as a motif. However, he does not restrict his references to news items and art objects, but goes on to look at people. There’s a very obvious Satyajit Ray in Ex-Nihilo, which Kai Friese, who wrote the accompanying essay, says Unnikrishnan wishes wasn’t as obvious a portrait (there’s possibly another less obvious one, but it could be someone else we’ve mistaken for Ray, which seems to be the artist’s intention).
Similarly, the woman applying kohl in The Blue Stones might remind you of Konkona Sen Sharma and the old man cutting clippings out of a newspaper in The Indian Sceptic might remind you of Tagore. The man in question is rationalist, Gandhian and humanitarian B. Premanand, who also founded the Indian Society for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. “He had a habit of going through a variety of newspapers every day and making cut-outs of bits of news that he found relevant for his work,” says Unnikrishnan, who had helped him at this job, which Premanand was particular about. “This was an important part of my memory of him, as is the magazine The Indian Sceptic. One can trace the Indian peninsula in the painting, and again, one is left wondering if that was intentional. Anxieties about (but not limited to) the climate, environment, and minorities, all come into play in these paintings. If you haven’t thought of everything that went wrong in 2016, by the time you reach the last painting, you will.
Unnikrishnan, who now lives in New Delhi, grew up in the southern port city of Kozhikode in Kerala. He tells us, “When I think of a home, I think of it as someplace on a hill from which I can see the sea in the distance. This has been layered with references from books, artworks and history over a period of time. Growing up in my little town, the sea was all we had. A weekend outing meant going to the beach.” He could easily be describing the plot premises of at least four of the paintings on display. His little town also finds mention in maritime history for building dhow-style ships called the uru, which are still in use for trade between India, the UAE and other countries of the area. In his spare time, these ships live on, as Unnikrishnan makes furniture and sculpture out of salvaged wood.
Similarly, Wood from Ships cobbles together plot points, giving, creating, and at times outright asking for a new way of looking, and salvaging our histories, so we know in what direction lies our future.
Wood from Ships on till January 7 at Chatterjee and Lal, Colaba
The author is a freelance writer
