Oct. 5, 2007
Contemporary Art in India
Atul Dodiya (born 1959, Mumbai), Tomb’s Day, 2001, three panels, enamel paint on laminate 191x129 cm
“In recent years I have allowed all of the world to enter the loneliness of my studio. I have painted, as if, at the crossroads—where East meets West, the popular and naïve meet the high classical or the very personal, autobiographical image overlaps the universal icon.”

Gulammohammed Sheikh (b. 1937, Gujarat), Traveling Shrine 2, Alphabet Stories, 2002-2004
“Living in India means living simultaneously in several cultures and times. One often walks into ‘medieval situations’ and runs into ‘primitive’ people. The past exists as a living entity alongside the present, each illuminating and sustaining the other. As times and cultures coverage, the citadels of purism explode. Traditional and modern, private and public, the inside and outside continually telescope and reunite. The kaleidoscopic flux of images engages me to construe structures in the process of being created. Like the many-eyed and many-armed archetype of an Indian child, soiled with multiple visions, I draw energy from the source.”

Kausik Mukhopadhyay (born 1960 in West Bengal, lives in Mumbai), Assisted Readymades: Alternative Solutions, 2003-2004, multi-media
“The City of Mumbai plays a major role in my work—whether it is images of the larger-than-life stars of the silver screen, or the miniscule living cubicles in the tenement colonies in the suburb of Charkop… My recent works are mostly made from functional objects such as toys, utensils, machines, and furniture, which have become obsolete household junk. The city of Mumbai is also full of small workshops. The mechanics here can repair anything and recycle everything including plastic with a bare minimum of technical means. The repairing and recycling industry also transforms the objects—bicycle wheels become machine parts—there is a strange kind of creativity here. This forms another connection between the city and my work…. All of my objects make sense only when peeped into, sat on, worn, toyed with, taken in hand. There is a need for some sort of participation. This reduces the distance and the burden the ‘seriousness’ of ‘art’ creates.”

Sharmila Samant (b. 1967, Mumbai), Handmade Sari, coke bottle caps, metal
“My work is a deliberation of my immediate circumstances and surroundings… My work critiques the market forces that define the cultural and art practices of peripheral nations and question how our identities, within the global set up, are sustained via a hybridization of our culture…. During work periods in Europe, where being from India I cannot escape the expectation and characterization of exoticism, I try to play interrogator of the processes of appearances.”

Pushpamala N (b. 1956, Bangalore) and Claire Arni (b. 1962, Scotland), Native women of South India, 2002-2004, Manual photographic print on metallic paper, 70 x 57 cm.
Subodh Gupta (born 1964), Bihari, 1999, cow dung in PVC solution on paper w/ blinking
             LED, bronze, photograph

Nilima Sheikh (born 1945, New Delhi), Firdaus I-IV, 2003-2004, tempera on canvas
“I have claimed for myself a lineage that engages with tradition and history—a lineage born of pre-independence Indian nationalism but fostered in a climate of ‘progressive’ internationalism and Asian bonding. Entering the art world in the late 1960s I learnt from my guru K. G. Subramanyan of the polyvalence and plurality of art practice, of the interdependence of plastic and other arts, of a non-hierarchical interweave of craft and fold practice with art, and of the linguistic structures of different systems of painting, their surface and form, mediated by societal and anthropological contexts. From my other mentor Gulammohammed Sheikh I learnt to share his passionate relationship with the art of the world and their histories, and to look for the ‘alternative’—in modes of perception, visual structures and the narrativisation of time and space—outside the inevitability of linearity, in the eclectic and the multiple. I have looked to alternative readings of the painting traditions—of Asia, particularly… scale, metaphorised projection, theatric aspiration, the desires of the imagination take their meaning from the context of the intimate, hoping to undo the fixity of boundaries and polarized categorization, resisting the appropriation of ‘tradition’ by reactionary forces.”

Santosh Kumar Das (born ? Bihar),
Muslim Men Seeking Shelter from Rioters, 2003, ink on paper
Chief Minister Narendra Modhi Inciting Religious Intolerance While Gujarat Burns and Gandhi’s Death is Forgotten, 2003
Rioter Becoming and Icon, Brandishing a Sword, 2003