ART AROUND THE BLOCK PART II
Hostile Witness by Baaraan Ijlal and Structures & Sculptures, by Moonis Ijlal, Shrine Empire
Long before the worries of the Omicron variant descended on us, folks were walking around visiting art galleries and of course the stately Bikaner House. The last visit revealed a collection of artworks by the artist Baaraan Ijlal, that she created over a period of 4 to 5 years, (a journey that she began in 2014 and one that is ongoing). The body of works looks at the city and its inhabitants which claimed greater immensity in her imaginings, and the political ramifications of the time that have played no small part in questioning every premise, every ,cul-de-sac, in our histories, their predicaments and their tales of treachery
As one enters, one is confronted with the wooden sculpture of a man with a gun-shaped-head, he stands before another man who has a similar head and the two seem to be in the midst of some kind of confrontation. One can only imagine the guns going off and the fight beginning. This wooden sculpture is by her brother, Moonis Ijlal, a historian and media personality, who is expressing his artistic side for the first time. The next artwork to grab one’s attention is a large canvas titled Jer Mahal in Dhobi Talao/Bombay/Mumbai, dated 2014 –19, painted by Baaraan Ijlal in Acrylic and Archival ink, The Wooden Frame is carved and rendered
by Moonis.
The painting takes us through the histories of this building in Mumbai that has played host to several cultures like Furtado’s Music shop that has supplied musical instruments to generations of Goan, Indian and even British musicians. Jer Mahal also played host to the Irani Café known for its bun-maska and cutting chai as well as the Universal Book Store — all of which are nearly a century old. Ijlal’s narrative style brings these structures together and she revisits their untold stories. As an artist she listened to the stories of the structures, as if it was a person speaking to her, she read into the ‘souls’ of the buildings till they ‘shared their secrets’, with her.
Thus the telling of the tales becomes a catharsis to ‘empty themselves of pain’. These fields of pain she drew into herself, almost physically. She says, “My body spills into these large canvases and stands there as a witness.” A witness to their histories, their secrets and their pain.
Threads of Time: The Material Memoirs of Puneet Kaushik, Gallery Espace
Puneet Kaushik is consciously handcrafting without making a handicraft,” points out author and researcher Annapurna Garimella. This distinction is being made since Kaushik’s expression is extremely abstract-contemporary and even the narratives he engages with, is extremely personal, yet the methods he employs to create his work are craft based. He uses a variety of conventional graphic materials from water colour, ink, graphite, charcoal, silver and gold paint as well as coffee, beads and thread. The paper is handmade in Auroville, Tamil Nadu where
he spent time in a paper workshop. All of these have been worked together using multiple processes including drawing, hand block printing, painting, cutting in the manner of sanjhi, the paper stencil craft of the Braj region in western Uttar Pradesh, stitching, winding, rubbing, pouring, pasting, to name a few processes. “The overall effect is by turns delicate and blunt, familiar and unfamiliar, saturated and entangled; the resulting work is highly and multiply textured,” adds Garimella.
One has seen Kaushik over the years experimenting with different methods and techniques related to craft where he brings a contemporary narrative and feel to the work. Take for instance the work titled The Grid (2021) which began talking of a Delhi Mohalla (colony) that he is engaged with. It started as a map of the area but as it progressed it became an ‘emotional landscape’ and the colour red that he loves to work with took over the landscape giving it an underlying quality of his passionate engagement with the region.
The handicrafts and handloom traditions of the Indian subcontinent have informed my practice for the past three decades,” says Kaushik. He has worked closely with master crafts-persons from India and the world, “We focus on equitable working conditions, on reviving traditional techniques by using innovative materials and technology, and sustainable production processes – my efforts directed at bringing about a transition in the Indian crafts sector,” says Kaushik adding “As a contemporary art practitioner interested in issues of identity, gender, violence and sexuality, I attempt through my work to disrupt the viewer’s understanding of the linearity of time, history and lived experiences,” Indeed he walks the delicate line between art and craft with such a practice and balance that is appreciable.
In Thin Air, Kartik Sood (Notes from a Walk Through), Talwar gallery
There is an intense sense of loneliness that envelopes Kartik Sood’s artworks that defy categorization. They are neither figurative in a narrative sense nor are they abstract yet they hold elements of the self and the other up for examination and dialogue in a manner that is highly abstract. A lone hilly landscape with an old decrepit building in the background is brought into focus by a prone body in the foreground. What is the state of this person in the foreground we do not know, are they relaxing? Are they hurt? Are they even alive? It is left open-ended for us to interpret.
Sood’s work is often
informed by his childhood in the hills of Shimla where he encountered silence, stillness and a capacity interwoven with daily life. “My works are a reflection of life in and outside me…the point of interference is where the shadow of the elapsed congregates the idea of the forthcoming,” says Sood in his poetic manner.
While there is something beautiful and poetic about his artworks they are also lanced with an underlying hint of violence. Sood’s work lays bare the conditions uniting humanity, but also insists that these include not only fragility but also powers of love, communion, and the creation of beauty.
The individual is at the center of Sood’s work, appearing across the paintings, photo-collages, video installations, and assemblages: at times a traveler-figure, venturing out into the unknown, at other times stilted in a state of waiting or contemplation. In all cases, however, the individual strives to make sense of his relationship with his surroundings, which often dwarf or envelop him––dramatizing the dilemma of living within a complex, sometimes paralyzing social and political structure.
Migrations, Praneet Soi, Vadehra Art Gallery
The theme that Praneet
Soi is exploring in this particular body of work is migration, which is also the title of the exhibition. The bird being a metaphor that connects up with his current state of travel and his earlier experience of migration as a child. The work consists of paintings on canvas that he created in his studio in Amsterdam and while in residency at the Luceberthuis in Bergen-Binnen,
in North Holland. It also includes ceramic tiles that were painted and drawn upon by Soi at a ceramic atelier in the region of Le Maupas, in Sussey, France. Soi used his time in rural Burgundy to work in plein-air, allowing a ‘primacy’ in the images that were etched out in special ceramic pencils, wash like under-glazes and deep over-glazes upon the tiles.
The exhibition underlines a conversation between pattern and figuration. It is an exploration that has been strongly marked by Soi’s work with craftsmen over the course of the last decade in the valley city of Srinagar, in Kashmir. These engagements have renewed within his work- a sensitivity to the pattern. He has been working with motifs gathered from the city’s rich Sufi culture. In fact, it was during his deep delving into the Sufi culture that the ‘theme’ of a bird appeared in his work. He adopted the bird-motif as a metaphor and explored this theme through this new series at Vadehra, which marks his return to Delhi after a period of five years.
The bird motif is distributed across a tableau of imagery that has Soi pointing to his recent journeys in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The large canvas titled The Bull-Bull and the Olive Tree is emblematic of this. The branches of an ancient olive tree said to have been planted by Romans in Sebastia (Palestine), frames a bird motif, that of a Bull-Bull within which a
view of the city of Srinagar is also interleaved.
Text by Georgina Maddox
Image Courtesy: Shrine Empire, Vadehra Art Gallery, Talwar gallery, Gallery Espace
Find more about the exhibitions and the Galleries:
https://www.shrineempiregallery.com/artist/baaraan-ijlal/
https://www.galleryespace.com/artist/puneet-kaushik/
https://www.talwargallery.com/exhibitions/kartik-sood2#tab:slideshow;tab-1:slideshow
