Contents
7
Preface
ESSAYS 13 REVERSE CANNIBALISM Introduction to INDIA : ART NOW Stine Høholt 54 KALEIDOSCOPIC PROPOSITIONS The Evolving Contexts of Contemporary Indian Art Ranjit Hoskote 64 ME, MYSELF, AND YOU Zehra Jumabhoy InterviewS 85 Rina Banerjee 89 Shilpa Gupta 93 Jitish Kallat MAximum CITY 97 PERSONAL GEOGRAPHY Suketu Mehta ARTISTS 122 ARTISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES 153 LIST OF WORKS
Bharti Kher, The hot winds that blow from the West, 2011. Detail. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth (24)
PREFACE
Since the nineteen-nineties, there has been an almost explosive development in Indian art, making the Indian art scene one of the most fascinating and vital in contemporary art today. This is in part due to the country’s rapid economic growth and the dissemination of new media and visual technologies. At the same time the Indian art scene has opened up in earnest to the global scene through exchange, dialogue, travel, and collaboration across national boundaries. In recent years the accelerating globalization has contributed to the country’s transformation into a region with a high rate of economic growth and a population numbering over a billion, providing the basis for new artistic and creative forms of expression, a high-tech urban culture, and a large public for art. INDIA : ART NOW illustrates how some of India’s most interesting contemporary artists interpret life at the intersection between the local and the global. Through large-scale installations and groups of works by a selection of thirteen artists and artist groups, the exhibition establishes a close dialogue between diverse artistic voices, each in its own way relating to what it means to be an Indian today. Against this background the exhibition catalogue focuses on new tendencies and artistic positions in contemporary Indian art and its role in the contemporary global art scene as viewed by leading Indian art critics, curators, and artists. Chief curator Stine Høholt gives an introduction to the artists, the exhibited works, and the three main themes of the exhibition: “The Urban Space,” “Identity and Everyday Life,” and “Selfarticulation.” Following this, curator and critic Ranjit Hoskote turns his attention to the Indian art scene, discussing the multiple meanings of “Indian selfhood.” Art critic Zehra Jumabhoy zooms in on identity and affiliation in contemporary Indian art. This theme is considered by author Suketu Mehta from an autobiographical angle in the concluding contribution to the catalogue, in which he describes the “personal geography” of his childhood. The catalogue furthermore features interviews with three artists, Rina Banerjee, Shilpa Gupta, and Jitish Kallat, who talk about their sources of inspiration and the changing art scene. INDIA : ART NOW is part of the project India Today/Copenhagen Tomorrow with the ambitious aim of bringing modern India to Denmark by promoting the exchange of culture, science, and trade between the two countries. ARKEN is the main party in this project which, besides the two exhibitions at the museum, INDIA : ART NOW and INDIA : FASHION NOW, includes Indian films, modern Indian dance and music, research, and cultural exchange. The project is supported by the Holck-Larsen Foundation, established by Henning Holck-Larsen, civil engineer and co-founder of one of the leading companies in India, the international industrial conglomerate Larsen & Toubro. The company was founded in Mumbai in 1938 and has since been highly respected in Indian society due
5
Subodh Gupta, Terminal, 2010. Installation view, Take off your shoes and wash your hands, Tramway, Glasgow, 2010. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth (17)
to its holistic thinking and social responsibility, providing housing, welfare centers, and education for the company’s many thousands of employees and their families. I would like to extend my warm thanks to the honorary chairman of India Today/Copenhagen Tomorrow, Mr. A.M. Naik, chairman and managing director of Larsen & Toubro. I would further like to thank the Holck-Larsen Foundation for making this unique and ambitious project possible. Without the foundation’s engagement and financial generosity, ARKEN’s exhibition project would not have been possible. We owe our gratitude to the Holck-Larsen Foundation’s board, especially its chairman, attorney Steen Lassen, who with great personal involvement and enthusiasm initiated the project and showed an extraordinary readiness to help bring it about. I would like to thank Larsen & Toubro Ltd. for having, in addition to Mr. A.M. Naik’s personal engagement, contributed significant financial support to the project. In this connection, thanks also to Mr. Sarbajit Deb, Vice President, Northern Europe, Larsen & Toubro Infotech, Denmark. Our thanks to the Nordea Foundation whose generous support for the three-year, cross-disciplinary project “Passion and Insight” helped make it possible. And thanks also to Ramboll, DSV, the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, Hindsgaul, and Neutral. My thanks furthermore go to the following individuals who in various ways contributed to the realization of the project: Peter Andersen, Ashok Kumar Attri, Flemming Hedegaard, Frederik Larsen, Maria Mackinney-Valentin, Janne Meier, Peter Nagy, Lotte Sophie Lederballe Pedersen, Anne Ring Petersen, and Freddy Svane. Our special thanks are due to the museums, private collections, galleries, and artists who kindly made their works available for the exhibition and have offered valuable assistance with the preparations: Haunch of Venison, Hauser & Wirth, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Gallery Nature Morte, Project 88, Sakshi Gallery, Tapi Collection, Tate Modern, Vadehra Art Gallery, Galerie Yvon Lambert, participating artists, and private collectors who wish to remain anonymous. We also thank the Danish Broadcasting Corporation and Casablanca Film as well as the Indian/Scottish designer duo Doshi Levien for their design of furniture for the exhibition’s reading lounge and Moroso SpA, Cavalicco, Italy, for the production and loans. An exhibition such as this can come about only through extended cooperation from the artists themselves. We therefore heartily thank all the participating artists who opened their studios to us during our visits to India and accepted our invitations to exhibit their works at ARKEN: Rina Banerjee, Hemali Bhuta, Atul Dodiya, Sheela Gowda, Shilpa Gupta, Subodh Gupta, Jitish Kallat, Reena Saini Kallat, Rashmi Kaleka, Bharti Kher, Ravinder
6
Reddy, Vivan Sundaram, and the artist duo Thukral & Tagra. Last but not least, I most sincerely thank the contributors to the catalogue for their inspiring and insightful essays. Christian Gether Director, ARKEN Museum of Modern Art
7
ESSAYS
Reverse Cannibalism Introduction to India : Art Now Stine Høholt
Long, black ropes, resembling bast fiber, hang in clumps from the ceiling or are tied around shiny, chromium-plated car bumpers, holding them aloft along the white walls of the exhibition space. This simultaneously sensual and minimalist installation was on view in the Fare Mondi/Making Worlds exhibition at the Arsenale venue during the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. The installation made up a complex network of independent structures, a sort of bio-architecture, created by the artist Sheela Gowda (born in 1957 in Bhadravati and based in Bangalore). For a while it pulled you out of the professional, blasé state of mind you can easily fall into after several days of wandering around the Venice Biennale looking at art. This was a succinctly articulated work with both presence and a global perspective. The long, black ropes were in fact woven from human hair. In a painstaking and time-consuming process, the artist had unraveled the shorter lengths of woven hair often seen tied around car bumpers in southern India, and rewoven them for use in her installation. In southern India the short ropes are used as talismans. Here, the hair is collected at the Tirupati temples where it is shaven from the heads of pilgrims as a ritual sacrifice. Sheela Gowda’s work Behold (2009), described above, focuses on superstition as it exists in India today. The materials used refer to a specific religious, ritual context as well as to the modernization of the country represented by the chromium-plated car bumpers. Gowda’s choice of material serves as an identity marker: a way of staging her identity by means of everyday elements. In other words, her works express an interest in the local, while simultaneously, the installation is formally close to contemporary Western art. The specific “Indian-ness” of the work is present not as a special quality—a special “spirituality” or “nationality”—but because the artist has staged a specific, local, Indian experience. The installation conveys this experience in a transnational idiom that everyone on the contemporary art scene can identify with. When I experienced the work at the Venice Biennale, it became a personal turning point, making it clear to me that today we are presented with an artistic map of the world where much of the creative innovation we see is taking place in the so-called periphery seen from the Western point of view—and borne by a sense of personal presence and social engagement. The exhibition and this accompanying catalogue have come about in realization of a wish to broaden knowledge of contemporary Indian art. The intention was to look at a cross section of the current art scene to discover whether it is possible to define a translocal, contemporary Indian art. That is to say, an art that borrows from Western art and at the same time preserves a “local” character. The exhibited works represent a bid on how to articulate a global, cultural identity today—a problem shared by all of us, whether we live in Mumbai, Delhi, Lemvig, Los Angeles, or Copenhagen. This article provides an introduction to the exhibited works. We have chosen to show a very focused cross section of Indian
11
Sheela Gowda, Behold, 2009. Installation view, 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and GALLERYSKE (15)
1 Saskia Sassen, “Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims,” in Trade Routes, 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, ed. Okwui Enwezor, (Johannesburg, 1997), p. 61. 2 Ibid., p. 56.
art, presenting installations or groups of works by the following artists: Rina Banerjee, Hemali Bhuta, Atul Dodiya, Sheela Gowda, Shilpa Gupta, Subodh Gupta, Rashmi Kaleka, Jitish Kallat, Reena Saini Kallat, Bharti Kher, Ravinder Reddy, Vivan Sundaram, and Thukral & Tagra. My aim is to point to some of the recurring themes that serve as identity markers in the works, under the headings: “The Urban Space,” “Identity and Everyday Life,” and “Self-articulation.” The Urban Space If you were to place pins on a map of India marking the places where the thirteen participating artists and artist groups live and work today, you would see that nearly all of the pins would cluster around the megacities of Delhi and Mumbai. This is no coincidence. Existentially, structurally and economically, these two cities are significant factors in the globally-oriented, contemporary Indian art presented in this exhibition. Megacities such as Mumbai and Delhi play a central role as an identification framework, and as a place to find inspiration for working with existential questions. Thus the artists’ point of reference is not the nation, but life lived in the city. The global metropolis is emblematic of globalization in many ways. It represents a hierarchical, non-neutral space for forming transnational identities and communities. As the political economist Saskia Sassen has stated, “The space constituted by the global grid of cities, a space with new economic and political potentialities, is perhaps one of the most strategic spaces for the formation of transnational identities and communities.”1 The development from the reduced importance of the nation state towards the increasing importance of global metropolises is described by Saskia Sassen as the emergence of a new “geography of centrality”—and this re-centralization within the urban space is worth investigating in relation to several of the exhibited works.2
Vivan Sundaram, Prospect, 2008. Courtesy of the artist (33)
Let us start by turning to the only sound installation in the exhibition, Chhota Paisa (Small Change) (2012), a further development of Hawkers Ki Jagah (A Place for Hawkers) (2005–09), created by the female artist Rashmi Kaleka (born in 1957 in Nairobi, Kenya; lives and works in Delhi). As a viewer you step inside a dark room where you are met by a cacophony of voices, a wave of sound that transports you beyond time and place and drops you within the work. This backdrop of voices creates an evocative portrait of street vendors in Delhi and is accompanied by pictures showing Delhi’s low roofs filmed in the early morning hours when everything breathes peace and quiet. It is a beautiful and very moving work in which the artist acts as an anthropologist, capturing and preserving a local, authentic culture about to disappear due to globalization; but it also represents the familiar background sounds that many Indians today associate with growing up in Delhi. ( ... )
12
Ravinder Reddy, Untitled, 2007–08. Courtesy of private collection, India (27)
14
Vivan Sundaram, Diva R-E-D, 2011. Courtesy of the artist (38, 37)
Atul Dodiya, Grace, 2012. Courtesy of the artist (11, 8)
Interviews
Interview with Rina Banerjee Mathias Ussing Seeberg
You earned a bachelor of science in polymer engineering before you completed a master of fine arts at the Yale University School of Art. Could you tell me about your way into the world of art and why you did not go straight to art school? The reasons for choosing the engineering field of study has more to do with the lack of choice I had in making that decision about my future. The applied sciences promised security, opportunity, acceptance, and status but most importantly hope. I cannot say, I was ever asked, what I wanted to grow up to be. I didn’t think to ask for something I felt I personally needed, like art. I studied engineering and completed it with great difficulty. I acquired work after graduation. The work was tedious, repetitive, and uncomfortably male dominated (I soon learned that all careers are male dominated). There in that moment of wishing and dreaming for something that drew me, I realized that my life was my own and that nothing could be more worthless than giving it up. I wanted to have the space, time, and privilege to think about freedom as a commodity in the world, my own migration and the migration of human beings all over the world, and what this mobility meant. Why was art so rejected? Why is culture so provocative, dangerous? Why do we separate, categorize people into easy, rigid locations? Why is home so debilitating to an individual’s freedom? Why are social structures and hierarchies important? Would you then say that these questions, which I suppose also concern questions of identity and how it is formed, are still at the heart of what interests you as an artist? I mean, who decides what we are? I think that how you are identified can become so important that people believe in it to the point of a religion. A navigation of people’s identity allows those who rule a kind of safety from those who do not. The politics of identity govern our lives, constrains and colors our achievements. A person of color in a white world still worries about being plucked off into the deep hole of persecution and violence. We are a socially and economically segregated community. We believe there is not enough for everyone that some shall have and others will suffer. Can we escape this assumption? Can we evolve out of this structural disability? It takes a valuable amount of time and patience to reach out and contemplate these things. My artwork is about a fiction that looks real and feels concrete. Art commands a magnetic awareness of our humanness and describes an awkward evolving beauty. I think by having art around us and supporting the movement of art in the global world we try to create a reality that there is something real that is bigger than what we understand or can see. The bigger is a destination we come near to—a location where hope lies.
19
Portrait of Rina Banerjee Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris-Bruxelles
Your sculptures comprise a vast number of different objects. What are your thoughts on the objects and materials you use? People’s relationship to materials and objects is sometimes dissimilar and it is in this lost translation that my thoughts about objects dwell heavily. The world of miscommunication is a creative gray area, where ideologies can be tested and submerged and new ones emerge. I am interested in the gap between cultures and disagreements within a culture/ community. Both physical dislocation through migration away from the motherland and homeland as well as a clinging to this space as a longing, as if a death had occurred. The materials and objects I choose often have archaic, nostalgic, romantic, sentimental, and baggage attached to it. Like barnacles they leave residue—even time and migrations weather their very existence. The meaning of objects never finds stability, because as long as people continue to migrate, travel away from their homes, look away to see new perspectives, the objects they once knew become unhinged and live. People are naturally full of tricks and when the powerful world presses hard, people get more oily, inventive and what was a terrible itch can become a triumphant molting. This is how we manage to transform. I am not what I appear to be in my own reflection and inquiry. Can objects continue to be the same? Sameness is imagined and fabricated. Difference is also imagined. You are not only a sculptor of materials, but very much also a sculptor of words. Your titles are often long poem-like sentences, that seem as much “the work” as the actual sculpture and not something added afterwards to be able to tell two crates in a storage apart. Could you explain your understanding of the relationship between sculpture and the titles in your work? I like the sound a text makes when we are mouthing the words. Like colors they can contrast, harmonize, create dissonance, cacophony, or stray away from the language being used. Text is trusted to mean what it is saying and hence you cannot easily deny its voice, its direction. We, as a culture here, have grown to become averse to the intellectual and art. Initially, I thought of this as an American phenomena, but lately we have seen an Americanized India. We are suspicious of lengthy anything. Minimalism and pop culture is the rage and new traditions dominate the landscape. I am very aware that I speak the English language, because I am Indian, and that it’s not mine, so I like toying with it, making it bend, stretch, reach. I sometimes think that impatience and clever convenience dominate most titles. I am interested in sharing something I think or feel that adds to the image or sculpture you see before you, neither directs it or commands it, and certainly does not explain it. My corruption of the English language is not just a small
20
rebellion but my attempt to massage it to speak for a vast number of people who use it sparingly, awkwardly, creatively under the pressures of globalization, colonization, and the commercialization of English culture. I am laying ownership to this language to make it cooperate with my vision and imagery. I work my titles to do somersaults, acrobatic feats, and create a space that is imprecise. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris-Bruxelles
21
Rina Banerjee, Her captivity was once someone’s treasure and even pleasure but she blew and fled away took root which grew, we knew this was like no other feather, a third kind of bird that perched on vine intertwined was neither native nor her queen’s daughters, a peculiar other, 2011. Detail. Courtesy of Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris-Bruxelles (2)
INDIA : ART NOW Until January 13, 2013. Buy the catalogue at ARKEN or order it at: reception@arken.dk
Today, India is one of the most vital and innovative centers of contemporary art. With great creativity and intellectual depth a new generation of artists are reacting to the rapid changes brought about by globalization in the world’s largest democracy. India : Art Now presents the aesthetic spectrum within which a number of India’s most exciting contemporary artists are interpreting the existence on the border between the local and the global. With contributions by leading Indian critics, curators, writers, and artists the book investigates and discusses new developments and artistic positions in Indian contemporary art and its role in the global art scene. Contributors: Ranjit Hoskote, Stine Høholt, Camma Juel Jepsen, Zehra Jumabhoy, Suketu Mehta, and Mathias Ussing Seeberg. Interviews with the artists Rina Banerjee, Shilpa Gupta, and Jitish Kallat.
156 pages, 81 color illustrations
Artists Rina Banerjee Hemali Bhuta Atul Dodiya Sheela Gowda Shilpa Gupta Subodh Gupta Rashmi Kaleka Jitish Kallat Reena Saini Kallat Bharti Kher Ravinder Reddy Vivan Sundaram Thukral & Tagra