The Saatchi Gallery in partnership with Phillips de Pury & Company
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: INDIAN ART TODAY
PICTURE BY PICTURE GUIDE Media Partner
The Saatchi Gallery in partnership with Phillips de Pury & Company
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: Indian Art Today
Gallery 1
Gallery 2
Jitish Kallat Public Notice 2 2007 4,479 fibreglass sculptures dimensions variable
Bharti Kher An Absence Of Assignable Cause 2007 Bindis on fibreglass 168 x 308 x 150 cm
Public Notice 2 recalls the historic speech delivered by Mahatma Gandhi, on the eve of the epic Salt March to Dandi, in early 1930 as a protest against the salt tax instituted by the British. Through this speech he lays down the codes of conduct for his fellow revolutionaries, calling for complete civil disobedience, the only fierce restriction being that of maintaining ‘total peace’ and ‘absolute non-violence’. In Kallat’s work, Gandhi’s ardent speech is recreated as a haunting installation with around 4500 bone shaped alphabets recalling a turning point in the nation’s history. Each alphabet, like a misplaced relic, holds up the image of violence even as their collective chorus makes a plea for peace to a world plagued with aggression.
In part inspired by artists such as Hieronymus Bosch, Francisco Goya and William Blake, Bharti Kher references magical beasts, mythical monsters and allegorical tales in which they might feature in her work. The blue sperm whale is one of the world’s largest animals. Unable to find sufficient scientific documentation about its anatomy, Kher invented the appearance of the whale’s heart for An Absence of Assignable Cause. Created in fibreglass, the artist has decorated the enormous heart and protruding veins and arteries with different coloured bindis.
Bharti Kher Hungry Dogs Eat Dirty Pudding 2004 Fibreglass and plastic 40 x 100 x 125 cm Relocating to New Delhi after studying art in Newcastle, England, Bharti Kher is an artist committed to exploring cultural misunderstandings and social codes through her art practice. Likening herself to the well intentioned ethnographer investigating her culture, Kher delivers a very forceful reinterpretation of modern India. In Hungry dogs Eat Dirty Pudding, a domestic hoover is covered in garish animal skins. These are the kind of inventive hybrid creations that Bharti Kher has made her own. Evoking the early work of Swiss artist Méret Oppenheim who covered a teacup, saucer and spoon with fur, Kher’s sculptural works appear incredibly surreal in their construction.
Atul Dodiya Fool’s House 2009 Oil, acrylic with marble dust and charcoal on canvas 243.8 x 152.4 cm Through his paintings and assemblages, Atul Dodiya engages with both political and art history in a way that entwines global/public memory and local/personal experience. In his most recent series of paintings Dodiya appropriates the images and styles of famous artworks. By doing this he pays homage to his influences, but also ‘borrows’ their identities through a kind of painting role-play: copying becomes a form of ‘channelling’ or re-enactment, weaving the master’s identities and ideas to Dodiya’s own (and vice versa). Fool’s House is a tribute to Jasper Johns, the American pop artist renowned for painting generic graphic motifs such as targets, maps and text fonts. The fragmented composition of this painting – divided into rectangular shapes – references the design typical of Johns; the segments of the canvas contain quotes of a Johns map and target. Dodiya first came to prominence with his paintings done on roll down security shutters, and in this work he imprints his own history upon his hero’s, re-conceiving Johns’s international abstraction as a local shop front. The ‘taped photographs’ in the scene make reference to Johns’s 1984 painting Racing Thoughts which used this device to quip famous artworks such as the Mona Lisa; in Fool’s House, one of Dodiya’s snap shots contains an image of Man Ray’s Cadeau, emphasising his painting as an offering or gift.
Atul Dodiya Woman From Kabul 2001 Acrylic and marble dust on fabric 183 x 122 cm Woman from Kabul is a work about living in Afghanistan at the turn of the new millennium. The artist recalls a country rich in history and resources that has collapsed under the weight of war. A figure of an elderly woman, stripped of most of her black burka, squats over a very decorative backdrop of wall paper. Her body is revealed as skin and bones, representative of the oppression and squalor that has become endemic of the city. Dodiya’s work is a potent reminder of the plight of the refugee.
Atul Dodiya Portrait Of Niko Pirosmani (1862-1918) 2005 Enamel paint on laminate board, cotton kurta and cotton pyjamas on iron hangers 183 x 122 cm In Portrait of Niko Pirosmani (1862-1918) Dodiya portrays the Georgian primitivist Niko Pirosmani, who was revered for having invented a new technique of painting during periods of solitude and poverty. The portrait of Pirosmani initially formed part of Dodiya’s large scale exhibition ‘Shri Khakhar Prasanna’ which was dedicated to his friend, the late painter Bhupen Khakhar. Believing that Khakhar was influenced by Pirosmani, Dodiya wanted to include the Georgian painter in his show. The artist uses found objects such as the cotton Kurta and pyjamas which hang over this painting. Here they are dyed a different colour in tribute to Khakhar, who dyed his kurta pyjamas black so he could wear them as an apron in his studio.
Reena Saini Kallat Penumbra Passage (Canine Cases) 2006 Acrylic on canvas, bonded marble, wooden box, stainless steel, velvet, glass Canvas: 135 x 90 cm Steel stand 38 x 122 x 78 cm Penumbra Passage (Canine Cases) comprises of a series of portraits of ordinary civilians from both India as well as Pakistan, their faces blemished by the silhouette of the disputed territory often referred to as Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. While the portraits are put in grand frames like those of royal descendants, the map of the land that remains at the core of the dispute between the two neighboring countries, casts a shadow on these portraits haunting us with tales from the region. The corresponding cases carry a range of weapons that appear more like museum relics, however on closer observation one finds that they are highly embellished with life affirming forms. Comprising a set of 32 pieces they collectively evoke human dentures, resonating with images of the conflictridden region.
Gallery 3 Huma Bhabha The Orientalist 2007 Bronze 177.8 x 83.8 x 104.1 cm
Huma Bhabha Museum Without Walls 2005 Clay, wire, wood, styrofoam 89 x 63.5 x 86.4 cm
Bhabha’s The Orientalist conveys ideas of exoticism, difference, and otherness. Equally primitive and futuristic, Bhabha’s figure theatrically poses as an ominous king or deity. Cast in bronze, it sits as an imposing relic from a fictional history, a regal air emanating from its polished geometric armour, molten death mask, and ethereal chicken wire veil. Humanised through exaggerated hands and feet and sympathetic cartoon styling, its powers waver between the comically surreal and portentously intimidating, drawing narrative suggestion from the loaded clichés of late night science fiction and horror movies.
Humorously referencing both tribal masks and modernism, Huma Bhabha’s Museum Without Walls presents the anatomy of a sculpture as voodoo construction. Using the traditional materials of sculptural moulding Bhabha constructs a skeleton of process, her formalist assemblage doubling as anthropomorphic entity. Laying bare her media and their function, Bhabha infuses her work with suggestive narratives. Museum Without Walls stands as both totem and architectural model, creating a contemporary primitivism from cultural refuse.
Huma Bhabha Sell The House 2006 Mixed media 139.7 x 96.5 x 71.1 cm Huma Bhabha Man Of No Importance 2006 Clay, wire, wood, bones, iron, cotton, fabric, glass 165.1 x 104.1 x 76.2 cm One of the ideals in modernist sculpture was that materials should refute illusionary form: rather than trying to ‘trick’ the viewer into believing that metal or clay might actually be flesh or hair, it was thought that materials should resemble themselves and be material-like. Bhabha draws upon these notions in a contemporary way. Man of No Importance exposes the exact methods of its construction, and the worn and brutal qualities of the materials give the sculpture an aura of ancient ritual and reverence. In Bhabha’s work, however, this ‘hallowedness’ is used to humorous effect as her mythological character, made from bits of scrap, becomes the physical embodiment of impoverishment, temporality, and ideological failure.
Huma Bhabha Waiting For A Friend 2003 Threaded steel rod, Styrofoam, wood, clay, paint 231.1 x 71.1 x 45.7 cm Approaching sculpture as a form of abjection, Huma Bhabha uses found materials combined with moulded components to create an aesthetic that’s equally industrial and barbaric. Using the rough hewn tactility of her materials, Bhabha’s work exudes a fragile sensibility; their underlying fictions of lost utopia wittily mirror contemporary anxiety. Bhabha’s Waiting For A Friend towers as a dejected fertility totem. Lingering lonely against the gallery wall, its archaic form swells with expectation: plaster and wax thighs bulging, head exaggeratedly erect, spilled guts on full display.
Central to Bhabha’s work is the idea that materials embody a kind of mysticism or power that can be activated or enhanced through the artist’s handling. Sell The House is a small sculpture made to the scale of architectural models or museum relics. Assembled from construction staples such as wood and bricks the body of her sculpture acts as a ‘foundation’ for embellishment. Utilising the aged and weathered qualities of her materials, Bhabha heightens their totemic connotations by adding clay to create an animistic form or mask. The ‘unfinished’ appearance of the sculpture both exposes the artist’s process of making and the materiality of the construction, framing these as something cryptic, compelling, and haunting.
Huma Bhabha Untitled Drawing 2007 Watercolour, pastel, pencil, ink on paper, mounted on board 40.4 x 30.4 cm Bhabha’s Untitled Drawing approaches drawing with the physical sensibility of sculpture. Mounted on board, the image is made more ‘object-like’ than if it were simply on paper. Bhabha uses a variety of media, each imparting their own distinct ‘feel’ and texture: indelible stains of watercolour suggest a poetic fragility underlying thick layers of greasy pastel, opaque ink washes, and gritty graphite residue. Bhabha’s physical process of drawing becomes enhanced through the earthy hues which record the evolution of the piece with a rough, organic aesthetic. The strong contrast of light and dark tones creates a deceptive spatial illusion; the abstract image, reminiscent of a mask, emerges with the three dimensional intensity of sculptural relief.
Huma Bhabha Untitled 2006 Clay, wire, plastic, paint 114.3 x 243.8 x 152.4 cm Working with found materials and constructed forms, Huma Bhabha reworks the familiarity of everyday objects into creepy inventions. Something between a primitive species and space alien, her Untitled is both ghastly and sympathetic. Set atop an altar-like plinth, Bhabha’s figure prostrates in submissive position. Shrouded in black, hands outstretched as if in prayer, it echoes humility and reverence; its aura of calm perversely interrupted by a rigid tail trailing out from behind.
Gallery 4 Huma Mulji Arabian Delight 2008 Rexine suitcase, taxidermy camel, metal rods, wood, cotton wool, fabric 105 x 144 x 155 cm (open with lid) Pakistani born Huma Mulji’s works explore ideas of displacement. Her preoccupation with cultural difference takes her away from India and Pakistan toward the Middle East and other landscapes. This juncture between tradition and the relentless modern thrust across India and Pakistan is where Mulji occupies herself with deliberate humour. Arabian Delight, a taxidermied camel forced into a battered suitcase, addresses ideas of the relocation of cultures. The rather crazed manner in which the collapsed camel is impossibly forced into this suitcase, legs thrown in disarray, is a humorous comment on the perceived ‘Arabisation’ of Pakistan as another Muslim state.
Huma Mulji Her Suburban Dream 2009 Mixed media 99 x 330.2 x 76.2 cm In a similar vein, Mulji’s most recent work titled Her Suburban Dream involves another taxidermied animal shown in an unexpected situation. The concrete water pipe has forced the cow in Her Suburban Dream into an unnatural and somewhat degrading position at the mercy of humanity. These compelling works explore change and disorder in the region and beyond.
Rajan Krishnan Substances Of Earth 2007 Acrylic on canvas 274 x 366 cm Rajan Krishnan’s painted works depict a reclaimed earth after humanity has abandoned it. His series of paintings pay attention to the changing landscape, as man-made settings are occupied and then deserted in the pursuit of something better. Krishnan’s Substances of Earth is a colossal acrylic painting that offers a dull palette and stylised forms. Recalling part of the grand-canyon, the detail shows a vast landmark taken over by animated insects. The surface appears overwhelmed by these creatures covering the landscape. Boulders of rock appear to resemble a carcass laid out on the face of the mountain.
T Venkanna Dream In Dream 2007 Oil on Canvas 153 x 259 cm (Diptych) From his studio in Baroda, Venkanna remakes two works of French painter Henri Rousseau, famed for his fantastical illustrations of jungle scenes and botanical gardens. Rousseau was chastised and then celebrated for his imaginative escapism and early primitive style in Paris. The political and social context of works Venkanna references are quite different from when they were made. He re-interprets these imageries and in the process critically evaluates the norms existing within contemporary society. Dream in Dream is appropriated from Rousseau’s 1910 painting titled The Dream. The historical significance of this work is not lost on Venkanna as he intentionally renders it as a post-modern image with idiosyncratic undertones. In this work, Venkanna replaces the woman from Rousseau’s original with a nude self-portrait. In the second panel Rousseau’s verdant jungle becomes animated in Venkanna’s hands. Turned on its side, the thin canvas takes the same subject but satirises it using cartoons to the point where the panel becomes garish. T Venkanna Two Moon 2007 Oil on canvas 213 x 153 cm Two Moon is based on an original work by Rousseau entitled The Sleeping Gypsy 1897. In his second canvas from the series Venkanna has taken the original scene from Rousseau’s painting and duplicated it as a repetition of the motifs within the painting itself. With very deliberate alterations to his canvas, Venkanna’s sleeping gypsy is both alive and dead, as he paints in a skeleton where Rousseau had painted a resting figure in multi-coloured dress. Venkanna’s figure brims with unrequited and unfulfilled lust. The black moon painted below is a sinister twin of Rousseau’s paler one, and symbolizes the tragedy of the figure’s former life. Although his body has turned skeletal in death, his penis, so charged with desire, stays alive with lust and remains fleshly, erect and blackened. The painting also resembles post-war American painting styles due to the additional red arrows on the surface of the canvas, crudely labeling the edge of the work.
Gallery 5 Tushar Joag The Enlightening Army Of The Empire 2008 Installation comprising 16 figures, perspex, plastic, brass, mild steel, wood, electric bulbs, wire and mixed media. Figure size: approximately 183 x 49 x 61 cm each Tushar Joag is an interventionist and inventor of mock corporate identities. He takes a satirical look at the urban classes and suggests that art is responsible for maintaining cultural continuity. This rhetoric leads him to conceive of unicell, a corporate body of one, that mimics many of the absurdities of government bureaucracy in a continent reliant upon social and political solutions. The Enlightening Army of the Empire is an installation comprising sixteen robot style figures that are animated by electric bulbs and stop lights. This Disney styled army of dishevelled robots appear to stand to attention holding florescent tube lights as possible weapons against human kind. Each individual robot is crafted with a subtly styled, quirky personality. Each of Joag’s steel figures stands loosely to attention, as their individual light configurations illuminate their location and tangled wires join their feet collectively. Shezad Dawood The Bestower 2007 Neon, tumbleweed with enamelled aluminium plinth London based artist Shezad Dawood’s British and Pakistani roots are reflected in his works. Appropriating many of his ideas from modern European and American aesthetics, Dawood generates a critical examination of identity. This series of sculptures are made of neon, entangled in tumbleweed and placed on aluminium plinths. The Bestower, The Protector, The Judge and The Majestic, utilise traditional scripts that radiate from the centre of a ball of tumble-weed, reflecting an element of the divine.
Shezad Dawood The Judge 2007 Neon, tumbleweed with enamelled aluminium plinth The neon works reject the rhetoric of a clash of civilisations, looking at a formal synthesis between East and West. Dawood’s works deliver a very complex set of notions that arise from symbols that are inherent to the two cultures that Dawood is familiar with.
Shezad Dawood The Majestic 2007 Neon, tumbleweed with enamelled aluminium plinth Dawood describes his attempt to formally represent notions of the divine as strongly as he represents something of the formlessness and abstraction at the heart of modern America. The dishevelled tumble-weed balls that are anchored into each plinth exist as symbols of time. The sculptures also reference the history of the American West, acknowledging the rise of a new kind of social religion embedded in bold patriotism.
T.V. Santhosh Tracing An Ancient Error 2007 Oil on canvas 122 x 183 cm Shezad Dawood The Protector 2007 Neon, tumbleweed with enamelled aluminium plinth Each of Shezad Dawood’s neon works reflects the artist’s interest in the ninety-nine beautiful names of God. Each attributed to Allah; the objective nouns are intended to describe every single aspect of the divine. Dawood’s neon works examine Islam as well as the doctrine of the early American frontier, since both grand ideologieswere born of similarly dry and desolate surroundings.
Employing the themes of war and global terrorism, South Indian artist T.V. Santhosh paints in lurid greens and shocking orange, recreating the effect of a colour photographic negative. The artist charges his large canvases with figures in contoured and compromising positions. Like many of his politically motivated contemporaries, Santhosh lifts pivotal episodes from recent history and renegotiates their appearance with a shock-bulb of violent energy that eclipses the work. Santhosh’s paintings of impending doom, a world at the brink of an atomic end, are intentionally more apocalyptic than cathartic. Tracing an Ancient Error is an illuminated work of what appears to be a bearded man lain out, revealing his chest, holding onto something resembling a thread. An image from recent news events, Santhosh captures this scene and reinvents its value as a piece of anonymous and charged history.
Gallery 6 T.V. Santhosh Stitching An Undefined Border 2007 Oil on canvas 122 x 183 cm
Probir Gupta Rats And Generals In A Zoological Park 2007 Acrylic and oxides on canvas 229 x 448 cm
Santhosh has switched positive for negative colours in this work. An aged man appears to be operating a machine in a confined space, standing tall against the projector on a table. The artist riddles the surface with wisps of illuminated light that fall over the image like uncontrollable energy or an explosive force. Santhosh often borrows from news images in his works but in representing them through negative colours, suggests otherwise hidden implications to be surmised.
Probir Gupta’s canvases are enormous in their scale and narrative. A Kolkata art student during the Maoist uprising in India in the early 1970’s, Gupta demonstrated against routine acts of violence and terrorism. Gupta’s paintings appear as grand history paintings, containing intricate details and pulsating backgrounds. In Rats and Generals in a Zoological Park, a sombre looking full-length portrait of Mahatma Gandhi stands robust in front of a coloured version of the Bayeux tapestry. Throughout the work, contoured figures and morose forms riddle the canvas. With his works, Gupta reorganises history into something messy, troubling and rueful. Nothing appears to take precedence.
Jaishri Abichandani Allah O Akbar 2008 Leather whip, wire, paint, Swarovski crystals 65 x 450 cm Allah O Akbar is created from black whips, painted in green and red and mounted against a white wall. The work incorporates the colours of the Iraqi flag (green, red, black and white) and also uses the same Kufic script to recreate the phrase or takbir used on the flag and recited by many Muslims. Literally translated the words mean ‘God is Great’, but as an American opposed to the war in Iraq, Abichandani references recent political violence unleashed in the country, by using leather whips and Swarovski crystals to form this phrase.
Probir Gupta Free Passage 2007 Acrylic and iron oxides on canvas 226 x 396 cm Free Passage has been likened to Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting Guernica. Gupta’s somber figures are depicted in black and white, with the words free passage painted across the canvas in Urdu. The inverted head of the statue of Liberty, camouflaged in army fatigue, emerges from what appears to be a pelvic region to the right of the canvas, as if in birth. The black and white figures possess a theatrical quality; they are shown witnessing the birth of an era of intolerance and violence. The forms, appear on the brink of dissolving, as colour disappears from the foreground and becomes rooted into the distance.
Probir Gupta Anxiety Of The Unfamiliar 2006 Acrylic and iron oxides on canvas 268 x 398 cm In Anxiety of the Unfamiliar Gupta’s figures appear to have transformed into beetles laid out as dreadful corpses. Man, machine and insect intertwine into incomprehensible forms resembling scenes from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Beneath these grotesque figures are a series of miniature negative portraits of men at the epicentre of significant episodes in India’s politically charged history.
Probir Gupta The Bene Israel Family 2006 Acrylic and iron oxides on canvas 229 x 396 cm Gupta’s portrait of the Bene Israel Family is a thoroughly engaging examination of the past. The Bene Israel were a group of Jewish emigrants, who settled in Cochin, in the southern part of the Indian sub continent, at the turn of the century. Research indicates that the Bene Israeli community soon rose to prominence and thrived in the Indian sub continent, at a time when Jewish communities faced persecution in Europe. In Gupta’s painting, the distorted background draws on the history of the Holocaust, whilst the Bene Israel Family emerges from this background in indigenous attire, as native Indians of the subcontinent. This work displays the artist’s ongoing examination of identity and social history.
Gallery 7 Kriti Arora Tar Man 5 2008 Fibreglass and tar 176 x 72 x 63 cm Tar Man 5, is a sculpture informed by the working men that Arora encountered along mountain routes through Kashmir. For Arora, roads are the social arteries that connect this region to the rest of the sub-continent. The struggling allegiance of men working tirelessly to re-cultivate the land for profitable redevelopment is the subject of her investigations. Unlike classical Indian statues or modelled deities, these very ordinary men are covered from head to toe in a suffocating layer of black tar as a demonstration of the almost incomprehensible work that is required to change India. The tar-man is emblematic of a continent seeking social and political change. Kriti Arora Tar Man 6 2008 Fibreglass and tar 185 x 76 x 97 cm Tar Man 6 is a mummification of one of the working men that struggle through the war-torn landscape of Kashmir. The routine with which they go about their laboured work in extremes temperatures is testament to the will of the people to contribute to change. Arora’s figure appears rooted to the spot, coated in a thick skin of tar smothering his ability to show any expression. The artist is examining the generation of men working on the road side, assigned to the difficult task of reconstruction and repair.
Kriti Arora Tools And Boots 2008 Fibreglass, cloth and tar 130 x 120 cm Continuing her preoccupation with labour, Tools and Boots 2008 contains tools of the trade, organised and arranged to bring some semblance of order to the brutal task that lies ahead of these individuals. Black shovels, pick-axes and gloves are all coated with thick tar. The installation appears to be consumed by this material, used to coat the roads and level the arteries of the mountains for the vehicles that thread through. The inanimate objects in Tools and Boots have been organised as one might arrange a still-life, which highlights the humanity that is missing from them. They serve no purpose without the army of men routinely utilizing them on cliff-faces and road-sides. Kriti Arora Coat And Trousers 2008 Fibreglass, cloth and tar 153 x 102 cm Blackened coats and heavy trousers operate as the residual skins of the people employed to build the road-sides. These fibres, originally coloured and textured, appear stiff and impossible to use as they are drenched in tar. Hung out to dry by the artist, the tar is too thick to remove, alluding to the combined and inseparable nature of the men and their labour.
Jitish Kallat Death Of Distance 2007 Black lead on fibreglass, a rupee coin and five lenticular prints Sculpture 161 cm diameter, prints 46 x 60 cm In Death of Distance five lenticular prints bring together contrasting experiences of living in India today. Each of the panels highlight two divergent news stories; the launch of ‘one rupee a minute’ telephone rates across India and a disturbing story of a girl who committed suicide because her mother couldn’t afford the one rupee she wanted for a school lunch. A rigid rupee coin is balanced on the gallery floor, while the two narratives flip and interchange depending on the position of the viewer. Jitish Kallat Rickshawpolis 4 2006 Acrylic on canvas with bronze gargoyles 178 x 274 cm Rickshawpolis 4 is like a vast collision portrait of a thumping, claustrophobic city-street. The vehicles collide on the face of the canvas like a mushroomed explosion; battered vehicles are intermingled with figures that appear to negotiate a way through this chaos and calamity. The painting itself is mounted on bronze sculptures that are re-creations of gargoyles that are found atop the 120 year old Victoria Terminus Building in the center of Mumbai.
Tallur L.N. Untitled 2007 Inflatable bed, silicon, latex rubber, medical cot and forceps 275 x 280 x 160 cm Bangalore born Tallur is an Indian artist who has rarely ventured outside India and grew up in the rural community. His works speak of the grinding poverty in the cultivated countryside. Employing Indian signs and symbols, Tallur conceives works that are characteristic of the underbelly of India, while still successfully managing to translate the anxiety of his subject matter to a larger audience. Untitled contains a hospital bed, with battered and torn bronze mattresses piled high. Tallur’s work delivers an incredibly depressing sight and sign of the objects of social utilitarianism. His sculptural works are riddled with the agony of laboured situations. For the artist, there is a pleasurable absurdity in the dishevelled traditions of the farmlands and the villages when compared to the new American-styled hyper-real cities that function as cash accumulators.
Gallery 8 Hema Upadhyay Killing Site 2008 Acrylic, gouache, dry pastel, photograph on paper, aluminium sheets, resin 183 x 122 x 61 cm Baroda born and Mumbai based Hema Upadhyay uses photography and sculptural installations to explore notions of personal identity, dislocation, nostalgia and gender. Upadhyay’s work Killing Site draws on the theme of migration and human displacement across Asia. The top of the work is based on Mumbai’s dilapidated shanty towns, here appearing upside down and protruding out like a canopy over Upadhyay’s decorated montage. Upadhyay draws on her own personal and family history of migration to express her concerns and this is expressed through the way she portrays herself in her works. The upturned slums reference the repercussions and socio-economic inequalities that emerge as a hidden consequence of the relentless tide of urban development in the city.
Subodh Gupta Spill 2007 Stainless steel and stainless steel utensils 170 x 145 x 95 cm Subodh Gupta employs many of the original techniques of French conceptualist Marcel Duchamp by elevating the ready-made into an art object. Gupta chooses signature objects of the Indian subcontinent and relocates them as art objects in monumental installations of stainless steel and tiffin-tins. Spill is an overbearing work of great scale that has at its centre a larger than life stainless steel water vessel, with many smaller steel utensils spilling over the edge like water pouring out.
Justin Ponmany Staple Agony II, Plastic Memory 2006 Acrylic and holographic pigment on canvas, diptych 191 x 325 cm
Subodh Gupta U.F.O 2007 Brass utensils 114 x 305 x 305 cm
There is a Darwinian approach to much of Ponmany’s practice, as he continually reorganises and reinvents reality. Rebranding by digitising, Ponmany duplicates figures in electric landscapes that are stylised beyond comprehension were it not for the reoccurring markers and motifs of figures and skyscrapers that appear in his works. Using plastic paints, silver holograms, rich pigments of colour and distorted photographic-negatives, Ponmany is as interested in the production of his works as he is in the object that exists thereafter. Staple Agony II, Plastic Memory is a work that might appear to come from the lyric of a Radiohead song, in which the solitary shell of a hooded figure is seated at the centre of an enclosed space with what appears to be an industrial staple-gun, illuminated in orange, floating in the foreground.
U.F.O is another work made up of hundreds of brass water utensils that are soldered together to resemble a flying saucer. This gleaming sculpture is amusing yet pertinent to ideas of sustainability, poverty and notions of otherness. The repetition of forms and the exaggeration of scale is a common element in Gupta’s work.
Subodh Gupta Still Steal Steel #1 2007 Oil and enamel on canvas 198 x 366 cm Gupta’s painting Still Steal Steel is a strange juxtaposition of a still life of steel utensils in the fore-ground, with a slightly garish floral design in the background. Gupta employs the effectiveness of a hyper-realist palette to suggest that the objects are more real than reality might allow. Gupta’s configuration of steel utensils along with the introduction of a floral element appears to reference a hierarchy of decorative forms. Subodh Gupta Untitled (Pot) 2004 Oil on canvas 168 x 229 cm With Untitled (Pot) Gupta manages to illuminate and elevate his ready-mades to positions of greater grandeur. His still-life paintings appear to celebrate objects in space almost as successfully as his ready-mades do. Row upon row of copper based utensils and tiffin-tins hang from a kitchen ceiling. Gupta’s paintings transform the objects to appear more valuable than usual.
Gallery 9 Bharti Kher Untitled 2008 Bindis on painted board 173 x 311 cm
Mansoor Ali Dance Of Democracy 2008 Installation with discarded chairs 427 x 244 x 244 cm
Highly regarded for her sculptural works, Kher has also produced paintings and installations that challenge cultural and social taboos in India. Untitled is composed of multi-layered and multi-coloured bindis. These numerous circles of coloured felt are concentrated on painted board. A reoccurring motif in her work, like the wheel rooted to the centre of the Indian flag, the bindi is at the centre of social and cultural identity and can be seen as a sign of the marital woman and her place in society. The bindi also traditionally represents a third eye, linking the spiritual and material world. In recent times, it has been reformed as a fashion accessory, available in different colours and shapes. With this work the artist is signalling a need for social change and challenging the role of the women entrenched in tradition, whilst also commenting on the commoditisation of the bindi as a fashion accessory.
Ali’s free-standing installation of discarded chairs piled high, without direction or reason, balances precariously and may at any moment fall to the ground. Ali often employs ready-made objects such as the chairs used in this work, which are wrecked and battered in their appearance. Rising from its elevated base, Dance of Democracy appears to stay upright by sheer luck, infusing his art with humour and poignancy.
Sakshi Gupta Untitled (Xerox Machine) 2008 Metal scrap, gears, motors 92 x 150 x 60 cm Reclaiming the wreckage of an old dilapidated Xerox machine that appears to have been used to the point of its extinction, artist Sakshi Gupta appears to have prized the shell apart as though a forensic scientist, looking over the anatomical organs under the natural light of the operating theatre. The work redefines uselessness as useful; stripped of its conventional productive function, the work alludes to the impact or consequences of what, in life, is otherwise hidden from sight. Elevating the machinery off the ground and positioning its integral parts side by side, Gupta manages very resourcefully to deliver something quite beautiful back. This recent work demonstrates Gupta’s ability to scrutinize reality for opportunities for creativity, even where death and decay appear much more prevalent. Chitra Ganesh Tales Of Amnesia 2002- 2007 21 C-prints New York based artist Chitra Ganesh studied literature at Brown and painting at Columbia. For the artist, the comic book appears to epitomise and perpetuate a perverse sense of good over evil. Such scenarios are at the centre of classic Indian literature such as the Ramayana in which men and women indulge in episodes of absolute and unsolicited power. The stylised simplification of the comic book style is central to Ganesh’s work Tales of Amnesia 2002-07 in which the audacious female character confronts subscribed notions of compliance in order to explore alternative models of femininity and power. By rewriting popular history, Ganesh appears to empower her character Amnesia with an opportunity to directly challenge the original fairy tale. For Ganesh, such preconceived social codes have always been heavily influenced by religion and literature and her work reconfigures these codes.
Chitra Ganesh Secrets 2007 C-print 122 x 114 cm
Schandra Singh The Lazy River 2006 Oil on linen 229 x 274 cm
Chitra Ganesh’s accomplished illustration is a wondrous scene in which reality appears to have been forsaken for something much more troublesome. Ganesh’s landscape of tranquil water is littered with female forms that appear to come directly from the artist’s imagination. Composed of vengeful double heads rooted on hands with decapitated fingers, adolescent school-girls sprouting from a tight-fitting skirt and blouse with multiple limbs and a naked figure hanging from a forlorn tree with lotus leaves and a hand; Ganesh’s vivid illustration is born of a deliberate stream of consciousness and a dream like state that very graphically challenges preconceptions of the representation of women.
Beautifully stylised and helplessly satirical, Singh’s oil works appear to be preoccupied by the absurdity of social notions of rest at a time of incredible unrest. Singh’s large scale paintings on linen depict figures of leisure wrestling with the oddities of the artificial water pool and inflatable rubber rings. Mocking them for their idleness, Singh depicts a landscape as far removed from reality as appears possible and in so doing draws attention to possibilities of social escape during a time of heightened violence. The Lazy River is an amusing work of tired and exhausted figures haplessly floating as they rest upon inflated clouds of white cushions.
Schandra Singh Neha 2008 Oil on linen 274 cm x 183 cm Chitra Ganesh Hidden 2007 Photographic triptych 61 x 63.5 cm Chitra Ganesh’s photographic triptych Hidden depicts the artist performing bizarre acts of mutilation and mysticism. The timeless backdrop and the indecipherable objects speak of Ganesh’s interest in the symbolism of classical literature that she actively critiques in her Amnesia works. Rather than indulging in beauty and heroic drama, Ganesh exposes herself to the vulnerability of performing for the camera.
Neha is a large scale work of a girl standing knee deep in shallow waters, with a recurring logo of a small lobster floating over the canvas. Singh’s figure appears to resemble a mosaic, composed of varying shapes and fragments of colour pressing against each other to formulate her face and body. Unfortunately Singh’s figure appears more perplexed than relaxed and as with all her stylised characters resting in these shallow waters, the audience are almost invited to laugh at the absurdity of these cumbersome individuals seeking solace in their artificial surroundings.
Chitra Ganesh Twisted 2001 Digital C-print 76 x 52 cm In Twisted, the artist appears to be twisted on a bed of leaves deep in the forest, illuminated by artificial light and struggling to find her feet in a strange juxtaposition of beautifully tailored costume and contoured body parts. It becomes almost impossible to rationalise what might have happened to Ganesh’s central character and why this figure stretched out appears utterly of another world. The work references notions of the plight of women in modern India and a willingness on Ganesh’s part to refer to very classical views of women and their subservient role to men.
Ajit Chauhan ReRecord 2009 162 erased record (album) covers 279.4 x 560 cm American born Ajit Chauhan, based in San Francisco, is an artist attempting to subvert our sense of perception by reorganizing existing visual languages. For one of his most recent body of works entitled ReRecord Chauhan uses old vinyl albums. The work is composed of 160 erased record covers pinned together onto a wall, forming unresolved and slightly faded portraits that recall and highlight the ephemeral nature of things. The record covers can be seen as a marketing tool and a form of expression. They are an expression of marketing, which is playfully undermined. Chauhan’s unresolved portraits are rendered abstract and a reoccurring absence of detail unsettles any sense of something more substantial. Chauhan’s playfulness, upon what already exists, amounts to a work of delicate resolve and mild amusement.
Gallery 10
Gallery 11
Jitish Kallat Eruda 2006 Black lead on fibreglass 419 x 169 x 122 cm
Rashid Rana Veil Series I, II, & III 2004 3 C prints + DIASEC 51 x 51 cm each
Eruda is a mammoth iconic sculpture of a young boy selling books on the traffic lights of Mumbai. The children (who could sometimes be illiterate) often sell these books authoritatively, playfully engaging in conversations about the book’s interest value; their rigour, audacity and endurance making them mascots for the resilience of a city such as Mumbai. Kallat’s sculpture has feet shaped like homes, forming the quintessential image of a nomad whose home is where he lays his feet. Treated in black-lead, ‘Eruda’ ensures that you take back a black stain on your fingers if you choose to touch him; also black-lead is the softest form of carbon while diamond remains the hardest.
Rashid Rana critiques culturally constructed, negative stereotypes of women through his work, whether in relation to the sexual objectification of women through the pornography industry or in relation to how the burqa is worn and perceived as a political symbol in a post 9-11 era. In Veil I, Veil II & III, Rana depicts an anonymous figure dressed in a burqa. Upon further inspection, the work is actually a fragmented collage made-up of thousands of small, unfocused pornographic stills of women. By using both these representations of gender in a rigid manner, Rana is effectively destroying them both, forcing the viewer to look beyond them and critique the so-called machinery of truth from which they are born.
Jitish Kallat Annexe 2006 Black lead, fibreglass, stainless steel base (Including the base) 145 x 46 x 46 cm Annexe is a sculpture of a young child, whose upstanding posture suggests a determination to survive. Weighing over his shoulder is a heavy serpentine rope used as a whip with which to lash himself in order to seek alms. Like Eruda, his feet shaped like homes appear rooted to the spot while his glistening black-lead body stands on a stainless steel base with a drain, perhaps representing a punctured sculpture pedestal or the societal gulf between the veneer of wealth and the perceived stain of real poverty.
Jitish Kallat Untitled (Eclipse) 5 2008 Acrylic on canvas 229 x 518 cm Kallat’s paintings from the Eclipse series are rendered in the epic scale and format of a film hoarding with the hard edge of a propaganda poster. The portrait of the city, rendered as a crumbling cascade of countless narratives, interlaces with the overgrown hair of the children as if they were raconteurs of the city’s inner secrets. The brimming debris forms a linkage between the heads of the children seeming to signify their common overlapping reality. Jitish Kallat Untitled (Eclipse) 3 2007 Acrylic on canvas 274 x 518 cm Similarly in Kallat’s huge triptych Untitled (Eclipse) 3, rays of sunshine emanate from the background; the grand radiance that forms the backdrop for the portraits is in sharp contrast to the caricaturesque rendition of the urban detritus brimming out of the unkempt locks of the children. Thus above their forehead are rendered a thousand colliding stories; perhaps the complex narrative of 18 million people living on an island of 600 square kilometers that is Mumbai.
Rashid Rana Ommatidia I (Hrithik Roshan) (Salman Khan) (Shahrukh Khan) 2004 C Print + DIASEC Rashid Rana’s work takes its title from the units that form an insect’s eye, the ommatidia, which individually provide picture elements for the brain to compose an image from. Rana uses digital images to similar effect in his Ommatidia series, where he takes some of the leading actors of contemporary Bollywood cinema, Hrithik Roshan, Salman Khan and Shahrukh Khan, and re-constructs their portraits from smaller individual elements. These renowned figures from contemporary cinema are the stable diet for millions of people in India, Pakistan and throughout the Indian subcontinent who almost religiously frequent the cinema and absorb the choreographed dance routines and songs that are the signature of every musical. Rana draws together hundreds of smaller crudely cut portraits of young Pakistani men; workers, attendants, shopkeepers, who appear haphazardly photographed by the artist, in order to compose a kaleidoscopic portrait of each of these actors. The minute faces look in adulation at their idols. Rana suggests that these cinematic heroes are the invention of the viewing public, who invest their own imaginations and desires in the hyper-reality that make up the lives of these Indian superstars. The Ommatidia Series ultimately subverts and re-appropriates the concept of desire and fantasy world created in Indian film, while pointing out the complexity of attempting to fabricate a cultural narrative.
Rashid Rana The World Is Not Enough 2006 - 2007 C Print + DIASEC 221 x 296 cm
Yamini Nayar Being There 2006 C-print 51 x 61 cm
In The World is Not Enough Rashid Rana creates an impossible image of immense beauty from his personal accumulation of photographs of social waste, taken mostly from a landfill site outside Lahore, the cosmopolitan city of Pakistan where he lives, as well as from the city itself. Reduced to miniature pixels of information, the details that form the much larger image, of what appears to be the undulating sea, are in fact hundreds of images of trash digitally ‘stitched’ into a non-existent aerial view that bear an uncanny resemblance to the large canvases of non-representational art from the post-war era. A sense of the scale and singularity of man’s ambition is indicated, not through great feats of industry or the miracle of science, but through one of the residual by-products of our age. Here, as elsewhere in the artist’s work, the juxtaposition of beauty and the macabre forces the viewer into an acknowledgement of the politics of the piece. A work that appears on one level to represent a notion of ideal beauty is in fact based on a more troubling examination of the increasing detritus and decay of the city.
In Being There, Nayar conceives a miniature room of paneled glass and fake columns with coat-hangers and a protruding guitar handle residing close to the floor. The walls and the floor appear uneven, resembling a kitsch corner for idle recreation. In the centre of the photograph is a bamboo stick bent slightly, jutting from the wall with a lamp-shade shaped like a beehive. Nayar explains her photographic works as a series of “spaces that question the iconic in photographic memory, where found images are pivot points for imagined, alternate structures.”
Reena Saini Kallat Synonym 2007 Acrylic paint, rubberstamps, plexiglas 195 x 134 cm The work stands like a screen, holding up a portrait formed by several hundred names of people, rendered in scripts of over 14 Indian languages. From a distance they come together as a portrait, but up-close they almost seem like a circuit-board of rubberstamps. The rubberstamps are made with names of those officially registered as having gone missing in India from different geographical zones. These include the names of those lost through natural calamities such as landslides, floods and earthquakes, the names of those who have gone missing during riots or large scale mishaps and the names of those abducted or absconding, with the police still trying to ascertain their whereabouts. These are people who seem to have slipped out of the radar of human communication, who have been thrown off the social safety net. The portrait of a sub-continental citizen is formed by numerous such names; the back of the portrait emerges as a sea of invisible identities, a bird’s eye view of a large human congregation. Yamini Nayar Underfoot And Overhead 2008 C-print 76 x 102 cm Yamini Nayar works with installation and architecture as photography, creating imagined, psychologically laden interiors from found and discarded materials. These installations are destroyed after the work is photographed, so that the photographic image serves as a stand-in for the original work. In representing invented spaces as still images, any sense of scale is concealed from the audience. The interiors appear destroyed by acts of nature. In Underfoot and Overhead a dishevelled staircase falls precariously from a doorway with a thread of foliage hanging over the darkened entrance. Once inside, a single light-bulb appears to illuminate a darkened room. The work takes its name from a Rudyard Kipling poem.
Yamini Nayar Sincere 2006 C-print 51 x 61 cm Nayar’s constructs recall the work of German artist Thomas Demand, renowned for his paper interiors that, once photographed, allude to something significant having taken place. However unlike Demand’s work, her fictionalised interiors such as Sincere are less a reconstruction from recent history and more a way into the artist’s imagination, in which objects and emblems are juxtaposed in architectonic niches. The artist uses both made and found objects as well as images sourced from cinema, photographic archives and mass media to create these interiors.
Yamini Nayar What Is Essential 2006 C-print 51 x 61 cm Yamini Nayar’s work What is Essential is composed of readymades juxtaposed into an interesting configuration of modern narrative. A photograph of a parachutist in faded black and white is resting between the tiled floor and the laminated fake wooden wall. The photograph and the array of porcelain and plastic objects appear to be organised as one might arrange a desk. The work explores the intimacy of objects in space, as they reference that of a found photograph central to the composition.
Yamini Nayar Luck Is The Residue Of Design 2007 C-print 51 x 61 cm Luck is the Residue of Design shows a seemingly abandoned space which the earth appears to have shaken dramatically. The delicate shell of walls and floor appear to have cracked under the weight of temporary motion. The alcove at the back seems to have taken some of the force of an act of nature or the weight of something man-made. The use of foreshortening creates a sense of compression and claustrophobia in this imagined interior.
Yamini Nayar Cleo 2009 C-print 76.3 x 101.5 cm A more recent photographic work Cleo (2009) shows a darkened attic with broken floorboards and an unfinished partition wall with an eye crudely cut into the back wall. The composition resembles a scene from a faded horror film. Nayar conceives and then constructs scenes of heightened melodrama. Nayar’s works lie somewhere between post-explosive moments of reality and dream like scenarios in which humanity has been wiped out.
Yamini Nayar Study 1 2008 C-print (architectural drawing on photograph) 26.5 x 34.3 cm By drawing directly onto photographs, Nayar’s 2008 series recalls the work of French architect Yona Friedman and his portfolio of working sketches and formal solutions for which he draws and scores directly onto documentation of pre-existing architectural spaces. Such inventiveness is at the root of Nayar’s geometric interventions that have her redesigning damaged cityscapes in order to suggest greater possibilities. In this work, Nayar manages to invent order out of chaos, to seek sense where there are only the remnants of destruction.
Yamini Nayar Study 2 2008 C-print (architectural drawing on photograph) 26.5 x 34.3 cm Thin white lines are spread very precisely over the surface of the photograph as the artist uses previous documentation as a place from which to invent something else. Nayar’s drawings appear to suggest that she has arrived too late to save this piece of reality and is instead seeking order in the remains of littered chaos. The end of everything is the point at which Nayar introduces creativity to consider what can still be possible.
Pushpamala N and Clare Arni From The Ethnographic Series Native Women of South India: Manners & Customs 2000- 2004 Medium set of 45 sepia-toned silver gelatine prints Bangalore based Pushpamala N is a photo- and video-performance artist who is the subject of her own compositions. In this series of works, the artist explores photography as a tool of ethnographic documentation and humorously challenges the authenticity of the photographic image. Created in collaboration with photographer Clare Arni, The Ethnographic Series draws attention to the choreographed stylistics of early anthropological studies, enacting and thereby transforming stereotypes of women. Dressing in period costume, Pushpamala refashions these stereotypes to subvert and critique the forensic classification of humanity. The strength of The Ethnographic Series lies in Pushpamala’s wit in reconstructing such scenes and playfully deconstructing them, acting both as subject and object to the camera.
Project Room
Gallery 13
Emily Prince American Servicemen And Women Who Have Died In Iraq And Afghanistan (But Not Including The Wounded, Nor The Iraqis Nor The Afghans) 2004 to the present Pencil on color coded vellum Project comprised of 5,213 drawings Each image: 4 x 3 in Dimensions variable
Richard Wilson 20:50 1987 Used sump oil, steel Dimensions variable Richard Wilson’s 20:50 is truly a contemporary masterpiece. The work is the only permanent installation at the Saatchi Gallery and has been continuously shown in each of the gallery’s venues since 1991. Currently on display in Gallery 13 – a room custom built for the piece – 20:50 transforms the gallery into a site of epic illusion.
Emily Prince’s American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (but not Including the Wounded, nor the Iraqis nor the Afghans) is a genuinely awe inspiring tribute. Comprised of over 5100 drawings – each an intimately rendered portrait of a fallen soldier – its scope is beyond rationale as the statistics of war are re-transformed into real faces, real people: identified, mourned, cherished, and remembered. Prince’s work is inspired by a memorial website where families post photographs of their loved ones killed in action. She visits this site several times a week and makes drawings for every update; those without photos are represented by an empty square labeled with the individual’s name and other biographical information.
Viewed from the entrance platform 20:50 appears as a holographic field: simultaneously a polished floor, infinite clear pool, an expansive and indefinable virtual space that clinically absorbs and mirrors the gallery architecture. The room is in fact entirely flooded in oil. Visitors are invited to examine the piece close-up via a walkway that extends into the lake, placing the viewer, waist deep, at the centre of a perfect mathematically symmetrical scope. Through this altered perspective 20:50’s phantasmical aura is enhanced, amplifying the disorientating and mesmerising experience of the space, and further confounding physical logic.
Rendered in pencil on small uniform cards, each portrait is an attempt to ‘see’ each individual: through studying their facial features, posture, and expression, and noting personal details such as their name, age, and place of origin. The coloured paper indicates the soldiers’ ethnic origin, further enhancing their individualism, and illustrating the socio-economic factors which play a part in American military recruitment. Through this humble ritual, Prince pays her respects and creates an astounding visual record of every soldier killed in action since 2004.
20:50 takes its name from the type of recycled engine oil used. It is thick, pitch black, and absolutely indelible: please take extreme care with your clothing and belongings, and no matter how tempting, please do not touch. 20:50 often has to be demonstrated to be believed: the liquid can be seen by blowing very gently on the surface.
The installation was originally hung in 2005 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco before being installed in the Arsenale of the Venice Biennale in 2007 in the shape of a 14 metre long US map, with each portrait positioned according to the soldier’s hometown; however, in the two short years since this showing, US troops have suffered casualties at an alarming rate: the vast number of new drawings makes this format of presentation impossible. The project is now installed in chronological order, as it was at the Wanas Centre in 2009, mirroring the Honor The Fallen page on www.militarycity.com. This fills 3 entire walls of the Saatchi Gallery, and spans 40 metres. Its sheer incomprehensible scale resolves as a moving and powerful protest. Exuding an overwhelming obeisance and dignity in its simplicity, the project breaks down the abstract enormity of war into countable, personal, knowable human terms. Its immense scale is commensurate with the enduring public monuments of past wars. Its meek construction in pencil and paper, however, does not point to glory and grandeur, but rather a tender fragility and impermanence, recording history’s making, its collective heroicism and loss, with touching and rarefied intimacy.
Lower Ground Floor
RICHARD WILSON 1953 Born in London, UK Lives and works in London, UK
EMILY PRINCE 1981 Born in Gold Run, California, USA Lives and works in San Francisco, USA
American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (but not Including the Wounded, nor the Iraqis nor the Afghans) is an ongoing project which will not be complete until American involvement in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan ends. The project is ongoing and of note, 2100 drawings have been added since it’s initial presentation in Venice.
Text © Rajesh Punj Text on Huma Bhabha, Emily Prince and Richard Wilson © Patricia Ellis Printed by ArtQuarters Press, London
Artist biographies JAISHRI ABICHANDANI
MANSOOR ALI
BHARTI KHER
RAJAN KRISHNAN
1969 Born in Mumbai India Lives and works in New York, U.S.A.
1978 Born in Jasmatpur, Gujarat, India Lives and works in Baroda, India
1969 Born in London, UK Lives and works Delhi, India
1967 Born in Kerala, India Lives and works in Kochi, Kerala, India
KRITI ARORA
HUMA BHABHA
HUMA MULJI
PUSHPAMALA N
1972 Born in Delhi, India Lives and works in Delhi, India
1962 Born in Karachi, Pakistan Lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York
1970 Born in Karachi, Pakistan Lives and works in Lahore, Pakistan
1956 Born in Bangalore, India Lives and works in Bangalore, India
AJIT CHAUHAN
SHEZAD DAWOOD
YAMINI NAYAR
JUSTIN PONMANY
1974 Born in London, UK Lives and works in London, UK
1974 Born in London, UK Lives and works in London, UK
1975 Born in Rochester, New York, U.S.A. Lives and works in New York, U.S.A.
1974 Born in Kerala, India Lives and works in Mumbai, India
ATUL DODIYA
CHITRA GANESH
RASHID RANA
TV SANTHOSH
1959 Born in Bombay, India Lives and works in Bombay, India
1975 Born in New York, U.S.A. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York
1968 Born in Lahore, Pakistan Lives and works in Lahore, Pakistan
1968 Born in Kerala, India Lives and works in Mumbai, India
PROBIR GUPTA
SAKSHI GUPTA
SCHANDRA SINGH
TALLUR L.N
1960 Born in Calcutta, India Lives and works in New Delhi, India
1960 Born in Calcutta, India Lives and works in New Delhi, India
1977 Born in Suffern New York, U.S.A. Lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York, U.S.A.
1971 Born in Karnataka, India Lives and works in India and South Korea
SUBODH GUPTA
TUSHAR JOAG
HEMA UPADHYAY
T VENKANNA
1964 Born in Khagaul, Bihar, India Lives and works in New Delhi, India
1966 Born in Mumbai, India Lives and works in Mumbai, India
1972 Born in Baroda, India Lives and works in Mumbai, India
1974 Born in Mumbai, India Lives and works in Mumbai, India
JITISH KALLAT
REENA SAINI KALLAT
1974 Born in Mumbai, India Lives and works in Mumbai, India
1973 Born in Delhi, India Lives and works in Mumbai, India
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