wide-eyed witness points at mishmash, gleaming steel: India Xianzai

This from a catalog essay for the ongoing India Xianzai show in Shanghai, which was a blast. Some of the things in here didn't actually make the show but no matter...



A hard-angled position that one would be hard pressed to hold for long, nevertheless she is held there, back arched, enrapt and gazing at the elaborate tiles of a mosque, above and behind her; their traditional ornament, exquisite and half-shrouded in mottled shadows, has her head bent backwards to the point where her face has disappeared, her throat bared for a moment, fragile, soft and pale in the half-light. The images themselves are produced on a set of ceramic tiles hung in a pattern on the wall, placing the viewer of Fariba Alam's 2007 “The Night Journey” in a position somehow analogous to the one depicted, gazing at the tiles, wondering what hard-angled position he is being held in. This transactional geometry between viewer and viewed, these angles of vision multiply refracted, this peculiar relation between the transient viewers and the durable though shifting gravity of architecture, of tradition, of dreams and abstraction—the “Night Journey” stands like a synecdoche for what the best of contemporary South Asian art has to offer: a glimpse of an unsteady subjectivity in motion, a tangled engagement, a sharp inquiry, and a visual delight. India Xianzai gathers together a representative body of work by a group of artists—some from India's megacities, some from its quiet corners, some from positions a continent or a generation apart—and brings them into close conversation.

It seems appropriate that “The Night Journey” includes fantastic travel and miraculous dialogue. Thematically, the work makes reference to a famous episode in the life of the Prophet Muhammad, one celebrated throughout South Asia as the shab-e miraj: his mystical “night journey” between Mecca and Jerusalem, his ascent through the heavens and encounters with the prophets and with God, from whom he receives direct instruction in the manner of the ritual prayer. The last detail forces us back to the striking posture of the faceless woman in the image—is she held this way in prayer, or in the gaze; is she a worshiper, or a sightseer? If the references in the “Night Journey” are intractably ambiguous, with no easy cues or pieties, Alam's 2009 “Ascent Diagram 1” maintains the indecipherability, balancing a half-naked, half-veiled female body—mirrored and mysterious—against a coldly geometrical pattern in the image's center. Alam's works here draw from the rich narrative traditions of Islamic South Asia, but resist simple allegory. Subterfuge and exposure, soft flesh and cold authoritative forms, tangle together and are held there unresolved, stilled in the midst of a movement.

Of the many delicate balances struck by Fariba Alam's images, perhaps the most immediate is the one between the artist and the messy nest of disparate strands that make up tradition. Hema Upadhyay's untitled painting from 2007 does something similar, one of a series of works by the artist featuring miniature photographed self-portraits collaged into ornamental backdrops that at times recall the careful pietra dura inlay of Mughal interiors, at others the charged, cool reserve of the Victorian drawing room. The efficacy of the image derives, in large part, from the artist's cut-and-paste inclusions, jarring an otherwise formal and decorative setting, estranging it and zapping it with an equivocal visual energy. Like Alam, Upadhyay juxtaposes the Apollonian precision of design with the fleshy disruptions of human figures. In this case, they play around, lounging about on the thick sugar-plum branches, staring into space, stroking the beak of a peacock painted in a Central Asian pink. Her work, like Alam's, poses the question of an individual's relations with a larger complex of ideas and institutions—call it “tradition”—that precede her. But in Upadhyay's image the identity of the heroine is far more precise, while the “tradition” she tangles with is far less easily placed: the fantasy garden setting recalls Indo-Persian painting, but could just as easily be elegant wallpaper inspired by—and at a critical remove from—the same.

Suhasini Kejriwal has long been a gardener of unreal landscapes that split the difference between the eerie and the decorative, experimenting with extreme compression, near-photographic precision and the messy materiality of paint. Her untitled 2009 painting presents a fantastic landscape, a jungle laboratory of intersecting visual fields, its botanical and anatomical images interlaced against a white-screen backdrop that allows them to push against each other. Some images are seen as through a microscope—dendritic and ridged—branches bristling against lush company-school botanical illustrations and delicately rendered paper flowers in silhouette. These structures push against each other, but never achieve settlement or solitude, instead remaining at the verge of collapsing together into an abstract visual pattern, enacting a complex, formal play that is at once tropical and reserved.


Hema Upadhyay evinces a different sort of magpie eclecticism in 2008's “Yours Sincerely” a sprawling slumscape diorama, rough-hewn and fashioned from crumpled tin, impossibly dense and devoid of life but stamped with the traces of some unseen violence. Here and there midrises teeter in a tin-roof sea, interspersed with the squat domes of neighborhood temples and mosques, and lonely blinded streetlights. The impossible density of Upadhyay's slum cluster is only barely hyperbolic, but in Vibha Galhotra's 2008-2009 installation “Neo-Camouflage,” it is exponentially, dramatically unfolded into a dystopian, near-future cityscape, a maximal urbanization like a vision from a hyper-Malthusian nightmare: seamless and self-reflecting, vertiginous and surreal. Six mannequins sporting “neo-camouflage” designed by the artist stand motionless against the screen, their uniforms mimicking the hypnotic and dizzied clusters of buildings stretching behind them. Megalopolitan sprawl is the setting for much of contemporary Indian and South Asian artistic production—and, for that matter, reception—which is itself only a bit player in a much larger moment of cultural, particularly pop-cultural self-production. The jostling visual field that the city presents—its unstable, hybrid assemblies of flashing screens, painted hoardings, jousting vehicles and the unprivate lives of India's poorest citizens—provides a rich resource to the imaginations of urban-dwelling contemporary artists, including Suryakant Lokhande, whose 2009 “Maximum City: Dreams Lost and Found” uses a restricted, flat palette of ivory, rust and gray to stitch together a series of four images that alternate between the slick, high-gloss dreams of advertising and the naive, even awkward stares of street children captured from above. Riyas Komu's careful large-scale portraits, by contrast, proceed from an entirely different angle: straight on, close up, and right in the eyes. His arresting 2008 “Borivelli” picks out the soulful visage of a boy from the neighborhood in Mumbai's sprawling eastern suburbs where the artist's studio is located.


In contrast with the gritty, battered tin-can realism of Hema Upadhyay's slum installation, the stainless steel in Subodh Gupta's paintings is gleaming, uncrumpled and unbought. Gupta has found in this material—used for a staggering variety of modular household, particularly kitchen, implements and containers—the basis for a visual language that can convey both the seductive pull of daydream yearning for the hygienic, orderly life the protean metal emblematizes, as well as the painful frustration of its delayed arrival. In his 2006 “Idol Thief 2,” bowls, pails and canisters loom in a metallic, flashing cloudscape. The objects are just out of focus, blurred and vague enough to accommodate unfocused ambitions, still hanging from the shopkeeper's display, unsullied and well-polished amid the jostling crowds and muddy potholes of the street, suspended in open-sided market stalls where the provocative contrast between their shining skin and the grime of what surrounds it is periodically renewed by an assiduous shopboy with a rag.


Thukral & Tagra's 2009 “Weekend Bonanza 4” draws on an entirely different repertoire of aspirations and images; a string of shiny shopping carts twists like a dragon through an artificial sky, in a confusion of floating plastic bottles and a rain of leaves and flowers. They seem weightless, enraptured. In a country where the vast majority of shopping still occurs in open-air markets or small shops, the shopping cart has an especially powerful and distinctive resonance, implying (or demanding?) a whole set of enabling conditions: wide boulevards flanked by well-stocked shelves, immediate access to a whole lifestyle's worth of products, together with the concomitant liberation from the hassle of having to ask for each little thing from a nosy shopkeeper, an errand boy, or a middleman. The superstore and the mall work a subtle but complete bourgeois redefinition of public space, creating an atmosphere of emancipatory exclusion, a high-end plaza for a high-end public enclosed and beyond the reach of the proximate, sharp-elbowed streets. It is the kind of place that Thukral & Tagra's plaster-of-paris “immortals” would call home. “Immortals 10 and 11,” from 2008, are taken from a series of images and sculptures that deploy portraits of Punjabi young men—many of them acquaintances of the artist—transferring them to the surfaces of ersatz household product containers, enclosing them in ostentatious frames, hanging them from the wall like taxidermy, sheathed in smooth skins of plastic and plaster.

Reena Kallat's are rubber. Her two “Synonym” pieces, from 2008, are mosaic screens fashioned from painted rubber stamps, transformed from old-fashioned clerk's tools to the medium for a blunt, bureaucratic portraiture of the Indian everyman and everywoman. The rubber stamps are encoded with the names of missing Indian citizens, kidnapped or slipped through the cracks, victims of flood or disappearance. Written in some fourteen different scripts and languages, the stamps point not only to the missing pieces in India's body public, but also to its contentious and productive heterogeneity, its mishmash of local, regional and national affiliations and the archiving that wrestles it into some kind of tenuous control. What results, Kallat show us, is the insufficient portraiture of the state, a record riddled with gaps and rifts, overlaps and redundancies, and scary silences. The clerk's ledger states that they are synonyms, these faces—as equal and interchangeable as citizens in a utopia, different only in appearances but in spirit and meaning the same—but the holes make their faces crudely atomized, unrecognizable at too close an angle, anonyms after all. Kallat's attention is on the distance between self and state, on the ghostly doppelgangers that live in official file cabinets, and on the technologies that bind the two in a mutually constitutive act of becoming.


A different sort of incompletion drives Mithu Sen's radical self-portraiture. In Sen's work, the bureaucrats' piecemeal mugshot abstraction springs into fleshy, unpredictable focus. “Dance after Depression 1,” 2007, features Mithu Sen the deer-girl, dancing with antlers and hooves instead of hands and feet, with big donkey ears and the elaborate tiger-striped sari of a shamaness wrapped around her, wearing a necklace of velveteen flowers. The artist celebrates the body as an incomplete object, emerging through a ceaseless, incorrigible process of becoming, playful and hybrid and unfinished—indeed unfinishable. The appeal that the tricksy grotesque holds for Sen is even more apparent in the dark comedy of “False Friends1,” a wall-mounted array of digitally altered, defaced and graffitied photographs—some are distorted with strange gore, there are lolling tongues, soft viscera, and everywhere an insistent, unsettling physicality. Here, as elsewhere in Sen's work, the monstrous works to deflate the pious, ethereal solemnities of the disembodied, disembodying institutions that surround us, debunking their claims to completion, wholeness and inevitability. The heroic bodies we see on magazine covers have been photoshopped into sham perfection and seamless smooth surfaces—the grotesque body is the body of holes, punctures and extrusions. The artist's rough digital cuts and edits are adamantly visible in “False Friends1”, not to be ignored, presenting us with something irreducibly variegated, a hodgepodge hybridity and teasing provocation. Like Jitish Kallat's “universal recipients”—with their traffic-snarl hairdos—the clumsy sutures and spills of Mithu Sen's false friends and centauress show that the trick for resilience is adaptability, heterogeneity, and being open to any type of transfusion.


A less playful atmosphere of gory metamorphosis and corporeal instability runs through Chitra Ganesh's 2007 “The Lucky One (Slow Burn).” Ganesh is an artist who has evinced a long interest in narrative and the enduring mutability of myth, mining a rich vein of South Asian popular culture, particularly comic-book renditions of ancient Hindu twice-told tales that the artist skews and tweaks, jarring their pedagogical and patriarchal homilies into something more threatening and strange, interrupting their smooth narrative flow, creating gaps and disjuncture. But “The Lucky One” pays oblique homage to a foundational myth of a rather more recent vintage, the famous eye-cutting scene from Un chien andalou, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's collaboration from 1929. The film notoriously opens with a graphic and disturbing scene of a man using a scalpel to slice open a seated woman's eye, which is shown in uncomfortable detail. The transgressive image circles back on its viewer, whose own eye seems suddenly implicated and vulnerable, seeing the unseeable. Ganesh revisits this moment fraught with violence, this epistemic visual rupture that marks the birth of Surrealism, centering her own gaze on the eye of a decapitated woman, staring back at us inviolate, glassy and hard, immune to further becoming, alien and fixed. On all sides there erupts a tangled spree of organs and entrails, stylized blood, blades and orifices. Ganesh takes the feminine vulnerability of the eye that sits at the heart of Bunuel and Dali's surrealist mytheme and reverses it, making of it an uncut, wide-eyed witness.

Schandra Singh's 2009 “Kali (Indian Goddess)” shares Ganesh's fascination with the mythic image, with the frangible, adaptable unsteady body of the goddess. Here, however, in place of violence and dismemberment is an aquatic, expressionist portraiture, swirling and patterned as though seen in light refracted through the gentle waves of a swimming pool on a hot summer vacation-day, its denizens vulnerable and half-exposed, their bodies barely contained, fracturing and coming apart and yet held together in the instant of visualization, and in that moment, enigmatic icons set against fluxing, frantically detailed stabs of oily color. The goddess Kali steps out of the sea, many-armed and many-eyed, a bullfight-red towel falling from her waist and beautiful grotesqueries sprouting from her head and shoulders—screaming cats, a wizened crone, a squirming mortal pinched between her fingers—the epic distance of the properly iconic is radically effaced by a depiction that takes delight in the viscous materiality of its subject's folds of oil-paint flesh, as she threads the space between the mundane and the metaphysical, between coherence and lunatic dissolution, between visual cues of an unearthly immanence and the New Jersey shore.

It is a private theophany, an Indian goddess if you couldn't tell already, stepping lightly.

And in case you hadn't guessed the "click to read more" link is total baloney, so don't even: