In 2012, Sudarshan Shetty named an installation “The pieces earth took away” and took it all over the world for exhibitions. Seven years hence he opens his solo at GallerySKE in Delhi with the words, “Pieces earth left behind”.
Ninety nine objects d’ art form an ensemble of emblematic and poetic memories. “The title is mine,” exults Sudarshan. “When the Chor Bazaar in Mumbai was to be demolished, I kept thinking of the things that were taken away and left behind.”
Sudarshan Shetty’s work on display
An ardent follower of Nirgun poetry, this devotee of Indian cultural heritage is a trendsetter in the world of Indian contemporary art. His ability of quoting subtle texts of Kabir’s poems and weaving it into his reclaimed wooden structures set him apart. There are others in the firmament who have followed his literary metaphors of picking up the poet.
Irony of dualism
‘Pieces earth left behind’ is about the dualism of life’s leanings. To unveil a show that is created entirely out of wood collected from second-hand wood markets, is an experience that dwells on seen and unseen ironies. Among the melange of 99 objects, the small bugle of a ship is as important as the tiffin carrier or the vessel that grinds the rice and therein lies the secret of integrating unknown stories and histories that these pieces of wood carry.
The newly designed objects, purposefully built, into dulcet dualities that have domestic as well as personal histories, and you know at once that the seeker consistently draws on forms that lie outside a canonical art history to question the range of understandings of time and place.
In the bugle used to alert sailors on a ship, the compass used on a journey in the seas, the vessels in the cultural fabric of an everyday existence, Sudarshan seeks the relationship between an object and consciousness even as he creates a narrative of journeys overtime. Architectural articulations create a consonance of echoes caught in the tryst of time.
Fragility of the familiar
The Chor Bazaar at Mumbai where he picked up these objects becomes his canvas of thought. In the fragility of familiar objects and age-old customs, Sudarshan explores the poetics of language in the throes of the past and the present, as enlivened to the private lives of those who lived in their own ambience and worlds. Deeply equivocal like Kabir’s couplets, each object in the show is a hidden repository of narratives playing out across the white cube as it unfolds tales in a frame of the conscious.
In 2017, he spoke of his genesis in exploration and said: “What remains unconscious to the self takes on a life of its own. Each object frames its own space and contains time – one domestic, the other public, but it carries within its own life story. ”
Fusion of traditions
The universality of nuances in the objects makes one think of the philosophical tales and parables of Albert Camus. In the rhetoric of irony, each object suggests new possibilities of meaning and perception, through the dynamics of sculptural and architectural elements.
It’s also like holding time in an hourglass, time that confounds linearity and builds on refractions that create ripples within the destiny of mortality. When you look at all 99 objects as a single ensemble, a host of associations run through your mind – mortality is ageless. You recall the ancient Greek view that the very beauty of human existence is largely dependent upon its brevity and fragility. You also recall Kabir’s rumination on the empty vessel- in this vessel lies the philosopher’s stone. In this case, it is the artist who is the philosopher’s stone. Sudarshan says: “Mortality is a condition for regeneration. It reminds me of the title of one of my shows: ‘ the more I die, the lighter I get.’
There are some who call Sudarshan a conceptual artist, but he surfaces as an archivist/diarist who explores the possibilities of inviting viewers into multiple journeys that sift and sieve through the prism of time. His objects carry within, an immersive, intuitive persona. They are vessels that are at once empty and sometimes full of the sap that humanity lives on. In the understated fusion of traditions, Sudarshan weaves the rigorous grammar of materials, and juxtapositions of objects that conform to culturally distinct spheres.
(The show runs till 5th October at GallerySKE, New Delhi.)
