MUMBAI.- Bunting: concerns questioning the conceptual. What are we celebrating and for whom? Are buntings specific to a celebration? Are they just another use for mass produced plastic? At the state handloom corporation in Patna, hand-woven muslin dhoties are now sold as cloth for banners because they are out-fashioned by mass-produced whiter cotton. Cotton produced through farmer suicides in Bombay’s hinterland. That very hinterland - Vidarbha sends the largest contingent of students to the JJ School of Art, and forms the largest inclusion here.
Routes that are known to us but form maps for Mustafa Khanbai or are captured by Christine Rogers as she flies over pristine mountainscapes of Iraq on her way from New York.While Parashar Naik rather ascertains that nihilism is the most inherent virtue of an artist as he edits a video of men renovating the clay roof tiles in Fort while in the background one hears Lawrence Liang speak at a conference on visual culture. Yogesh Barve assembles a group of 3-D sculptures in a collaboration that needed artists in New York, Warsaw, Bombay to design objects that were then printed in state run subsidised libraries in Helsinki and the Google Cultural Institute in Paris. Poonam Jain ties the show around in 'Chintz' patterns copied by Khadi Bhandar - the organisation set up by Gandhi to protest Manchester cotton that came largely with the popular 'Chintz', ironically only to be transported back into khadi in the seventies.
Tejswini Sonawane, Avinash Motghare and Prasad Nikumbh warp faces of animals and humans into a monumental woodcut that funnels what she witnesses outside her home in Dharavi. Ouso Chakola sets tone to the exhibition with cynotypes made from transferring digital photographs of posters from Tamil Nadu's rationalist movement on the walls of the temples of Tiruvannamalai, addressing the movement's now apparent irrationality. While Sachin W Bonde, transports political murals of elephants by etching them onto metal, only to be lead by the blind man's stick.
Clark House's ceiling is carved out and transported to Chemould, which are fragments left behind from Prabhakar Pachpute's famed debut solo Canary in a Coalmine, 2012. Seema Nusrat finds beauty in the way entire buildings in Bombay are draped in 'Blue Tarp' during monsoons, an aesthetic unseen in her hometown Karachi. While Michael Vickers & Adrien Rousseau see inspiration in the 'religious' specifically in Elephanta during their stays in Bombay. Nikhil Raunak and Rupali Patil draw us away from the city towards the rural where caste and prejudice reign. Reghunadhan surrealist in his actions draws the futurist city inviting us with giant buntings that fly over the cityscape.
David Horvitz informs us through his silk-screens that we do not own the beach, as much as policy makers who do not own the city's coastlines as they edge out the Kolis - (Bombay's indigenous people) from their traditional cultural and occupational right over the beach. A print in German announces the show of Gilbert & George, shot in many colours - theatrical as if back-staged by a cathedral reminding us of the comical assertion of politicians over the city's popular festivals through large buntings that celebrate themselves.
Pisurwo a self-taught painter from Ajanta, brings the entire exhibition together. Born Jitendra Suralkar, he has a fascination for Picasso & Husain. He along with us make assertions on conceptual practice, not to provide answers, rather question the only reserved aesthetics, and would rather hear from the audience their reception of the show. No work in the show has been made exceptionally with the privilege of singular authorship. Most of the names mentioned above have contributed together creating collaborative works, the artists exceed the objects. Amol K Patil welcomes you to the exhibition at Chemould Prescott Road in its 52nd year with a work called Naman, or Salutations.
This exhibition is on view from July 28 through August 25 at
Chemould Prescott Road.
