‘What is contemporary...’ is both a rhetorical question and the title of Art Alive’s new show which brings together the works of three young artists. Debuting the gallery’s annual series called Contemporary Idioms, this exhibit is curated by Anushka Rajendran, who is a curatorial assistant with the Kochi Muziris Biennale.
“The term ‘emerging young artist’ is much-abused,” says gallery director Sunaina Anand. “The idea was to start Contemporary Idioms to look at fresh languages of artists coming from good [art] institutions. Sure, you can be a self-made artist, but the institution you’re coming from shapes your thought process, making a language that you’re sure of even when you start off.”
Shiv Nadar has a laboratory sensibility with mentors as opposed to teachers, Visva Bharati has an academic focus on drawing, given its legacy with Indian masters like Nandalal Bose, and Srishti School has a conceptual design sensibility. This might be a generalisation, “but it’s what I gather from these artists,” Anand says.
Divya Singh, 24, MFA, Shiv Nadar University in Noida
Divya’s deliberately dreamy and slightly smudged still-life paintings are meant to be an exploration of a “dystopian vision of freedom”, she says, talking about the thrill of waking up really early, before anyone else, and walking around the house like you’re the only person in existence. Or doing the same really late at night.
Nox Umbra, from the series Moth; 48in x72 in; by Divya Singh
An orange-hued frame that shows an indoor scene, with a smattering of furniture and a doorway shows light delicately falling from one side of the room, illuminating only the emptier spaces. It makes you feel like the space has been recently abandoned, even though there’s a pet-animal-like figure sitting in a corner. “When people pass away, they leave everything behind. And spaces are transformed really by nothing at all...it’s not like something in the house changes,” she says.
All her paintings have a focus that draws the eye through light. She is aiming at “pure vision”, she says. When she paints, her vision moves like light, touching everything just the way light does. To her, this is freedom.
Suman Chandra, 27, MFA, Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan
Research about the miners in and around West Bengal and Jharkhand informs Suman’s work. In patches, the light blue square-graph on the canvas is left exposed. The artist uses black patches to show a significant presence of coal as a contrast to the pleasant pastel pink of the larger landscape.
Suman also takes the route of the personal to tell this story. He has made portraits of people in these vast scapes, filled with chickens and pet dogs, to showcase everyday life in the mines. But the highlight is a sculpture. In a block of coal dust mixed with sand, he’s engraved the inside of a mine, with the silhouette of a team of miners, sitting together, as if posing for a portrait.
“This was a real photo,” he says, attaching even more significance to the piece by sharing what he’d heard a year ago: The same team died in a mining accident.
Purvai Rai, 24, graduate of the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bengaluru
Other than three ink-on-paper works, which have been made referencing evocative photographs of textile draped in different, flowing ways, Purvai’s works are all fabric. Variously arranged — as liner dots, discs, and abstract patterns — the artist talks about a journey of her self, via the context of parental support and the shifting parameters of cultural identity
Like most artists, she draws on the memories of her growing up years, where the coarse material of her father’s labada, a traditional tunic-like garment for men in northern India, offered her much comfort during cold winters evenings. In the same breath, she laments how mass-manufactured retail has made clothes irrelevant as markers of cultural identity.
From Memory Graph; 7 in x 20.5 in; Jute, Yarn, Cotton on Mount; by Purvai Rai
To bring these two things together, she uses red-maroon fabric to denote herself (the colour of the root chakra or muladhara in Indic philosophy, she says), a coarse brown of jute, for her father, and an off-white cotton to denote her engagement with the word. In a couple of frames, this off-white is also made of synthetic (“a lot of my clothes are, to be honest, man-made fibres, like a lot of my generation’s,” she says).
Whether intentional or not, it is noteworthy that in a series of frames that she’s titled ‘Memory Graph’, the brown jute is seen supporting, embracing, or really filling the entire space inhabited by the red and white.
On view till 10th September, 2019; S-221, Panchsheel Park
