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Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India
Themes of the Exhibition
Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India encompasses an extraordinary range of art created between 1993 and 2003, including artists from across the country who represent several generations and social contexts-from those who remain rooted in their communities to others who are active on the international stage. Exhibition curator Chaitanya Sambrani helps visitors sort out the dizzying variety of work in the show by dividing it into five sections: Location/Longing, Transient Self, Contested Terrain, Recycled Futures, and Unruly Visions.
The artists in Location/Longing express, in the curator's words, a “desire for place.” Artists in this section include N. S. Harsha, who has created the monochromatic painting For You My Dear Earth especially for the exhibition. Drawing on the language of miniature painting and botanical rendering, the artist engages with location “through an expansive contemplation of intertwinements between natural and cultural realms.” Another approach to place is seen in Secret Life, a series of oil paintings by Vasudha Thozur, in which the artist places her self-portrait in various symbolic “houses.”
The Transient Self section focuses on migration and psychological and social transience, which Sambrani sees as major features of contemporary experience both in India and in the world at large. A video work by artist and activist Tushar Joag uses the frenetic pace of life in Mumbai as the backdrop for the artist's confessional story. Subodh Gupta's work, including Bihari, his self-portrait created from cow dung, “can be read as an extended commentary on his migration from his native Bihar (with all of its associations with backwardness and corruption) to upwardly mobile Gurgaon and a kind of world citizenship.”
Contested Terrain features artists who respond to fundamentalism, in particular during the years since the Babri Mosque was destroyed by Hindu nationalists in 1992. One of the most expressive works in this section is Vivan Sundaram's installation Memorial, inspired by imagery of an unknown riot victim. The collaborative Open Circle (Sharmila Samant, Archana Hande, and Tushar Joag) is committed to bridging art practice and political activism. Based in Mumbai, the group creates public projects, often in collaboration with local unions and other organizations, that critique globalization and consumerism. For this exhibition they have created a three-dimensional soundscape.
Recycled Futures includes works that make use of tradition as a means to satirize popular culture. The Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective-Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta-created the Web-based Global Village Health Manual in collaboration with Mrityunjay Chatterjee. Online viewers see images of prints from early Bengal and nineteenth-century product packaging that act as frontispieces to an assortment of, in the artists' words, “pictures, stories, news and rumor, speculations and skirmishes in info-wars, databases and image banks, hard facts and harder fictions.”
Lastly, Unruly Visions is devoted to artists who comment on popular culture as seen in “television, news and advertising, cinema and Bollywood, museums and mausoleums, shrines, and the unruly mix-up of visuality that characterizes the street.” Ravi Kashi's Everything Happens Twice takes the form of cast-paper televisions displaying appropriated pop-culture imagery. Paradoxically, the material he uses demands great attention to craft. Atul Dodiya's triptych Tomb's Day makes parodic reference to that stereotypical Indian icon, the Taj Mahal. Cyrus Oshidar runs a “free-to-air” TV channel that has done much to shape youth culture in India. Its irreverent programming is marked by “an anarchic fusion of the cosmopolitan and the vernacular.” In the exhibition, viewers watch program excerpts on a TV placed on the shelf of a typical Indian stand along with candy, cigarettes, and other items “for sale.”
Written descriptions can only suggest the richness of the exhibition. Take your own trip to the Edge of Desire to sample its array of art from a country that is fast becoming a dominant member of the global community.
Constance Lewallen
Senior Curator for Exhibitions
Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India is co-organized by the Asia Society, New York, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, and is curated by Chaitanya Sambrani.
The Berkeley presentation of Edge of Desire has been supported by the Consortium for the Arts at UC Berkeley and by Ginger and Moshe Alafi.
