The 10th edition of the India Art Fair, New Delhi, may well have come up short in an unexpected area. I don’t mean the plethora of collateral events that have threatened to eclipse the Fair with their energy and innovation over the years. Rather it was the gutsy if modest Irregulars Art Fair that mirrored on a minuscule scale some of the identifiable art fair gestures, even as it cocked a snook at the main event.
Positioning itself a few doorways away from Khoj in Khirki village, the most sustained artists’ initiative in South Asia, which also came up in protest against mainstream practices, the Irregulars Art Fair presented over 45 artists, a roster of music performances, a café, and film screenings.
What’s more, it monetised entry, charging what a regular art fair does. While entry to art galleries is free, they remain elite zones of exclusivity, speaking only to the converted.
Fringe to fore
By staging a curated show based on a democratic principal of entries for so many young artists without the filter of a gallery, the Irregulars Art Fair seems to herald an alternative. If it goes through with its intent to manifest pop-ups in different cities through the year, a fringe event around the art fair may well be in the making.
Reactions to the India Art Fair have varied over the 10 years since its inception. The boundless enthusiasm of its founding director Neha Kirpal guided it from its early occupation of cavernous, bat-infested halls in Pragati Maidan to the vast tents erected at the NSIC grounds in Okhla, New Delhi, a model popularised by the Frieze Art Fair in London and New York. In this period the Fair has flirted unconvincingly with design, a guest curator, and attempted and then given up a discursive space in the Speaker’s Forum, where it brought in curators and critical thinkers from across the world.
The brief pre-eminence that the Fair enjoyed as a viewing site was undercut by the ambition and scale of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and now, the Dhaka Art Summit, which signals serious intent in the areas of multiple curated exhibitions and serious critical debate.
With Neha Kirpal stepping aside this year, and the global conglomerate MCH taking over, the India Art Fair seems to be shifting towards greater professionalisation, perhaps.
Kirpal and her team had tried to put their finger in one too many pies, involving the Fair as a testing ground to counter institutional failure in the visual arts. Clearly such a mandate was too ambitious and incompatible with the event, and now the Art Fair can get on to doing what it set out to do — engaging in the business of art.
Each year, a slew of exhibitions and ‘collateral events’ surround the Fair and mark the beginning of the art season in the city. Usually this heralds the urgency and momentum of the contemporary: in the past it has been gaming season with Thukral and Tagra, and sprawling retrospectives by Subodh Gupta and Jitish Kallat.
This year Rameshwar Broota and Riyas Komu (both Vadehra Art Gallery) offer fresh perspectives within their practices. Broota returns to his scratch and scrape technique in mid-size paintings, and creates a sense of the archaic in architectural digs in small resinous works. Using a medley of materials — wood cuts, wooden sculpture, photography, images as widely diverse as portraits of Gandhi and Ambedkar, pages of the constitution and the Harappan dancing girl — Komu makes an undisguised attack on a failing state, treating its emblems as markers of terminal decline.
However, the artist who stands apart with a resilient and enduring vision is Zarina Hashmi, a New York-based artist and print maker. Born in Aligarh in 1937, and trained at S.W. Hayter’s Atelier 17 studio in Paris, India and Japan, she is a contemporary of Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and Arpita Singh, as well as the late Ganesh Pyne.
Imperfect recall
The modest scale of her chosen format belies the enormity of her investment in the human condition. Using minimalist abstraction, Zarina has evolved a highly personal language that uses architectural drawings, maps and cartography, the Urdu script to develop the idea of home — its loss and absence, its fragmentation and the consequences of forced migration.
In a compelling 2015 print titled ‘Rohingyas: Floating on the Dark Sea’ Zarina signalled the global crisis which has only accelerated in the last three years. Embedding the political in the personal, she has continued to reflect on South Asia, the loss of her childhood family home in Aligarh, now only a photographic memory.
In her solo exhibition ‘Weaving Darkness and Silence’ at Gallery Espace, her engagement with sites as an emotional locus play out; however here there is no redemptive noor or the light of grace. Using the woodcut, a medium ennobled by at least two generations of artists during the nationalist period, she brings a potent intimacy to her subjects.
Darkness appears as a presentiment, lines morph into barbed wire, and shards of the night collide and tumble across the surface in this deeply thought provoking show.
The writer is an art critic and curator who, while preoccupied with her art website www.criticalcollective.in, is also contemplating a book
