City Tales an online exhibition conceptualized by Roobina Karode, the Director and Chief Curator, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) poses important questions to the urban dilemma through the works of 21 contemporary Indian artists
Is it the skyscraper, the drains, the dancing neon lights, or long lines of endless traffic that evoke our experience of big city life? The online exhibition City Tales invites artists and viewers to contemplate the duality of the cityscape, where on one hand it is a glorious beast of production and progress, but on the other, it presents its residents with alienation, anonymity, vast dumps of urban junk and a fast-paced existence, often removed from the ‘natural settings’ of small towns or rural agrarian settlements.
“The exhibition invites the viewer to a broad spectrum of artistic responses invoked by cities and their changing landscape over the years—as a hostile machine, a social theatre, hegemonic structure, utopian dream, symbol of progress as well as a spectacle of pleasure and paranoia,” writes Roobina Karode, who along with her team at KNMA have conceptualized the exhibition culled out of the vast collection of Director Kiran Nadar’s privately-funded museum of art known for exhibiting a leading selection of modern and contemporary works from India and the sub-continent.
This exhibition presents a ‘contradictory yet compelling’ representation of urban experiences. Many of the twenty-one artists represented have a layered experience of the city since they draw upon their lived realities as ‘emigrants’ from the ‘rural hinterland’ into the city. Despite a sense of dystopia attached to the postcolonial city, it also offers an alternative space of ‘promises.’
The exhibition is structured in sections, the artworks are presented through the following sub-themes: Junkspace-Archive, The Urban Dreamscape, Ruins of the City: Fragments of Redemption, and A Curatorial Epilogue.
The section Junkspace-Archive brings together the works of artists Sheba Chhachhi, Atul Bhalla, Sudhir Patwardhan, Hema Upadhyay, Vivan Sundaram, and Nataraj Sharma to contemplate a variety of experiences that move from dreamscape to urban nightmare. Chhachhi’s memory map of water bodies in Old Delhi evokes a landfill littered with abandoned projects of modernity as well as ecological/traditional remnants. Bhalla presents a dizzying visual tapestry of sewerage covering photographs from Mumbai, while Sudhir Patwardhan’s city-compositions exceed and disrupt the conventional rules of pictorial construction.
We are presented with the poignance of the late Hema Upadhyay’s installation, a composition, and an aerial view of Mumbai’s densely crammed shantytowns with their shiny tin roofs. Artist Vivan Sundaram’s outlandish ‘masterplan’ for the city molded from ‘trash’ collides with Nataraj Sharma’s bare structures of modular buildings, further extending the notion of the city as a “junkspace, an accidental archive of failed urbanism.”
The subtheme The Urban Dreamscape serves up a ‘Theatre of Utopian Promises and Surreal Anxieties’. It is a surreal stage for enacting collective fantasies and personal anxieties. It brings forth Pooja Iranna’s fragile yet evocative architectural models made of stapler pins, and Rathin Barman’s concrete blocks that narrate the unbearable lightness of being a migrant. Nalini Malani’s film Utopia catalogs the artist’s view of the ever-expanding gap between the developing and the underdeveloped in a megalopolis. Jagannath Panda, Pratul Dash, Dhruv Malhotra, and Raqib Shaw resort to a nocturnal or surreal world flickering between the bizarre and the beautiful, ecstasy and gloom, while a cloaked narrative of carnal desire and fantasy unfolds in Bhupen Khakhar’s tailor shop, that hints at homoerotic desire cloaked behind the everyday business of ‘fitting’ out clothes for men.
We take a time leap back to Bikash Bhattacharjee’s Calcutta (now Kolkata) of the Naxalite-1970s where the city streets are littered with the ghostly severed heads of children and torsos of young women in the section Ruins of the City: Fragments of Redemption. Bhattacharjee’s work approaches the Indian city as a melancholic ruin, while Ram Kumar’s canvas speaks of urban isolation, the important milestones of birth, marriage and death that characterize the decomposing city of Banaras. Gulam Mohammed Sheikh’s work evokes the incinerated Ahmedabad brought down by communal riots while Ashim Purkayastha and Anita Dube’s installations respectively demonstrate the mutability of urban ruins into escape-shelters and souvenirs of freedom.
The evocative casein-tempera paintings mounted on the boards of five plywood panels by Nilima Sheikh pay homage to the migrant female workers in the global healthcare industry. Under the section Curatorial Epilogue, it examines how an alternative and therapeutic idea of the city emerges from the folds of the anonymous traveler, the city migrant.
In addition to that, Jayashree Chakravarty’s archive of a ‘healing nature’ reveals to us how the postcolonial urban, despite its dystopian overgrowth, still nudges humanity to survive; and what should the city, in turn, return and retrieve for its own survival.
Online Exhibition live from Aug 3rd, 2020 ongoing till Aug 31
https://www.knma.in/city-tales/
Text by Georgina Maddox
Image Courtesy: Collection: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
Find out more about the Artists and Gallery:
https://www.knma.in/director-and-chief-curator
http://www.artnet.com/artists/atul-bhalla/biography
http://www.artnet.com/artists/ashim-purkayastha/
http://www.artnet.com/artists/bikash-bhattacharjee/
http://www.artnet.com/artists/hema-upadhyay/
https://www.artsy.net/artist/sheba-chhachhi
https://www.saffronart.com/artists/sudhir-patwardhan
http://www.artnet.com/artists/vivan-sundaram/
https://www.saffronart.com/artists/nataraj-sharma
https://www.saffronart.com/artists/pooja-iranna
http://www.artnet.com/artists/ram-kumar/
https://rathinbarman.weebly.com/biocv.html
https://www.saffronart.com/artists/jagannath-panda
http://www.artnet.com/artists/pratul-dash/biography
http://www.artnet.com/artists/raqib-shaw/
http://www.artnet.com/artists/bhupen-khakhar/
http://www.artnet.com/artists/gulam-mohammed-sheikh/
http://www.artnet.com/artists/ashim-purkayastha/
http://naturemorte.com/artists/anitadube/
