E catalogue gipin by Vadehra Art Gallery

Lifetimes Gipin Varghese

Lifetimes Gipin Varghese Â A solo exhibition by the recipient of the FICA Emerging Artist Award 2012

24 July - 6 September, 2014

Gipin Varghese’s first solo in New Delhi, titled Lifetimes, features a body of works produced over the last two years that explore personal methodologies for relooking at news and imagery of violence, death and struggle emerging from non-urban contexts within India. Employing a semi-illustrative language Varghese goes about ‘re-documenting’ popular images from sensationalised news stories. Through this slow act of capturing on paper with paint the flashing news images about social violence, he pays tribute to the human element of loss, suffering and struggle that is forgotten in today’s fast-paced world. The works are about the lives of ordinary men and women whose bodies slowly ebb away under their daily struggle against systems that exclude them and their needs. Their stark frames, gestures and postures amplify the hardship and violence people endure, yet shy away from creating a sense of spectacle or shock. Varghese received the FICA Emerging Artist Award in 2012, for which he travelled to HSLU Luzern, Switzerland for a threemonth residency as part of the collaboration with Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council, New Delhi. This exhibition is part of Vadehra Art Gallery’s collaboration with the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art for the Emerging Artist Award programme.

Lifetimes - Gipin Varghese in conversation with Bhooma Padmanabhan

BP: As we put together your second solo exhibition titled Lifetimes at Vadehra Art Gallery, which also happens to be your first solo in Delhi, I would like to take this opportunity to go back and start at the beginning, and ask you to share some memories of your early engagement with arts.

same school and this proved to be a turning point for me. It gave me a new perspective into the significance of the spectator. The energy and kick I got out of arranging shows and engaging with spaces was great. I think these were my formative years when I started really thinking about my own practice.

GV: I grew up with my parents who were really quite open in their parenting. They didn’t have any concrete agenda for my future and never forced me to study, and so I grew up with a lot of time with myself. In preschool I used to make red colour by grinding stone with water on the floor to make paintings, seeing this a teacher in my school got me into art competitions. I participated in many such competitions in school. This was an outlet for me during my school years, away from the pressures of studies. I naturally joined Fine Arts College in Trivandrum, where I studied painting. The college atmosphere was great, craziness had value on campus! There they promoted nature studies and allowed us to create local narratives. However any object placed outside its natural condition was considered worthless, so this was something we were not encouraged to explore. It is here I learnt about Brueghel, Kota miniatures etc. which inspired me to try and look to doing something like this in my local situation but the results were not satisfactory to me always.

I then went on to doing my PhD from MG University in Kerala which was a slow and steady process. It involved a lot of work but also a lot of travelling, seeing and documenting murals, and many free hours of my own to paint. I also got time to attend seminars and discussions. It was a good time. It really allowed me to stop seeing things in black and white and pushed me to find the greys. Following this I came back home to Payyannur where I continued my work, engaging as much with understanding myself as my immediate present. I had long discussions with my friend Om Soorya, who was my classmate and also from the same town, and this helped me find a direction in my work. This is when I also started approaching galleries with the help of friends like Sujith SN.

Soon I went to study my MFA in Hyderabad Central University where our teacher Alex Mathew introduced me for the first time to the contemporary art scene in India. At that time I didn’t see my practice fit into the contemporary at all. Of course I wanted to change but didn’t know how to make the transition. It is in Hyderabad that I got the chance to work with theatre people from the

BP: It seems to me that your years as a PhD student have been rather significant in your life, especially in how it helped you develop your vocabulary as an artist, particularly as a painter. Can you share with us a little more about these years and what you learnt? GV: Yes! During my PhD I saw one type of practice – a study – being transformed into another which is of a completely different structure (referring to the Kerala miniatures and alter pieces that were the subject Gipin’s PhD research). The

Indian folk artists were employed by the Portuguese missionaries to transform Biblical themed stories into alter pieces. The result was really really strange. They had typical folk motifs which the artisans maintained despite the new theme, and there was also the typical Christian symbolic language which was new to India. Here both languages seemed out of sync. Yet it gave me some very significant insight into the transformative possibilities of language. Instead of Christian symbolism being lost in this new visual language it seemed quite safely preserved in the folk forms, sometimes even more effective in its direct style. From these works in the small churches of Kerala I found faith in drawing. The power of drawing, filled with plain colours, limited palette of various densities.

BP: So coming back to this show and the works you have developed for it. There seems to be a great deal of energy and thought invested around the “body” in this set of works – the woman’s body, the labourer’s body, the dead and living bodies of Indian peasants, the body of struggle and protest. GV: Yes, my interest is in life; the living beings. Living beings are copied in different scales, spread in time and space. We have some idea about the nature of various groups (of living beings/people)... but we really get to know them only when tested during extreme situations. It is in such difficult situations that the true strength of living beings is revealed. When confronted with this question of mortality.

BP: ...and how do you explore them in this set of works? GV: Here, in this show, there are three types of works – one about natural knowledge and the spirit of humans to resist something that causes harm to their lives. The second is a strange kind of intolerance (in society) towards love and interrelationships between different social groups. The third is about people waiting undesired death. The first one is about the reaction of common people to losing their habitat. Situations like Kundankulam nuclear strike, Khandwa jal satyagrah to save

farming land, Mithi Virdi anti-nuclear strike, Dongria-Kondh against mining company Vedanta in Niyamgiri Hills, Odisha etc. Here we can see the spirit of protest in common people, a kind of natural knowledge about ecology, their value for it and wish be closer to nature. People find innovative modes of protests, and I study them as a phenomenon which has parallels worldwide. The second type of work is about the repeated violence against women, the raping and killings, especially in the rural areas of India. It is in total contrast to the first, about this romantic concept of an Indian village and its values. Here I am working on a particular incident from West Bengal where a tribal girl was gang raped on orders of a kangaroo court as the entire village watched! She was in love with a boy of another caste, both were tied to a tree for a whole night. They were fined, the boy paid and she could not, so she was raped by thirteen men. There are so many incidents like this...like this work about two minor Dalit girls gang raped and hung on a tree in Baduan district, UP. The third set of works is about people choosing death over life despite the desire to live. Irom Sharmila’s case is the rarest of all; she is alive and dead at the same time. She is a question and answer to many things in life. There are also this work about suicides of cotton farmers in Andhra Pradesh, which has a parallel all over the country, their poverty, struggle and the ultimate decision to take their own lives.

BP: I would now like to direct my question to your choice of narratives – you have referred to particular incidents that made national headlines and adapted it into your work. You had mentioned to me once earlier that constructing a new narrative is not what is important to you; you choose to borrow the stories and reconstruct them for the purpose of your work. GV: Yes, I am interested in creating a work of fiction around sensational stories. I choose them because they speak of extreme conditions and human tendencies in these situations. The fact that they are real news items validates them for sure. However they need not always be famous stories, even unknown

incidents may work in this process. For me it is important to create the land, feel the air and create a whole new environment within which these stories can be played out. I repeat the same bodies in these environments to give them the feeling of life, or being real. If that is perceived as narratives, then yes they are narratives but for me the environment where these incidents happen, where such violence can happen, is what is important to engage with.

BP: That is interesting as the rural landscapes that are so romanticised otherwise are not innocent anymore. And that brings us to the question of aesthetics. It is quite distinct in your works. The sheer intricate quality of your work seems to draw the viewer in before confronting them with the narrative or story. GV: I pick some structures from established, traditional art forms and reuse them for my purpose. The concept of beauty and the aesthetic value related to historical forms naturally changes, and I don’t attempt to adopt it to make a personal style; that would seem like mimicking it. But yes, certain structures that come from the traditional art forms I try to work with, like the postures and body types of iconic figures in Christian arts of Kerala, which I feel allows me to move away from clichéd types in figuration.

BP: You keep coming back to nature. The visual emphasis on flora and fauna is quite distinct in your work. What role do they play in the overall scheme of things in your work? GV: When I look at space in real life the human is just one part of it. They are just part of an interrelated balanced system of beings. I want to tell tales of humans in relation to the other parts which are usually plants and animals. I don’t use them metaphorically. They are just there, like the dust we breathe or the ant covered cashew nut tree.

BP: Finally, the title of this show “Lifetimes” hints at the lives of the common people which are usually lost in the larger historical narrative. Is this the intension of your use of the title? GV: Yes. A lifetime is the time one normally lives in this world, here I am thinking about how this one lifetime of each person is riddled with difficult conditions, pains and struggle. That is all we get.

BP: One last question. This show has evolved out of your work over the last two years. You got the FICA Emerging Artist Award in this time and travelled to Switzerland on a residency for it. How has this affected you or your work?

BP: and your miniature language comes from this? GV: I was introduced to miniature painting traditions during my BFA years, and later took a special miniature theory class in MFA by Shilpa Mehta. This is when I learnt to study miniatures, and it really helped me during my research in PhD while documenting hundreds of murals of Kerala. I have great passion for murals, miniature and manuscript drawings. Not the classical forms of popular Indian mainstream tradition, but the crude folkish forms. They are so self evolved. I like their use of repetition and their system to study nature, and the fact that the works are not always human-centric. I feel the miniature language speaks most intimately about the common man and his way of seeing.

GV: The award has given me great confidence in myself and pushed me to continue working. It came right after my first solo in Mumbai and so when I left on the residency I decided not to have any fixed plans for it. I continued with my practice every day in the studio there. I made the work about Kudankulam there, thinking and painting these black bodies in a place where everyone I saw was white. The works about Jal Satyagraha were also made there and it came together as a small exhibition titled “Four works on Resistance” which I showed at Hochschule Luzern - Design & Kunst, Switzerland. My scribbling book I gave to a teacher at HSLU who was doing a magazine project. It was on the whole a great experience as I got to meet many new people, visit museums, and just see such different plants and flowers everywhere.

Lifetimes Watercolour on paper 81â&#x20AC;? x 16â&#x20AC;? (each) 2013

Commonly Caught Species Watercolour on paper 9” x 117” 2013

No One Eats Cotton Watercolour on paper 62” x 11.5” (each) 2013

The Dust We Breathe Watercolour on paper 7â&#x20AC;? Diameter 2014

The Dust We Breathe Watercolour on paper 7.5â&#x20AC;? Diameter 2014

The Dust We Breathe Watercolour on paper 7â&#x20AC;? Diameter 2014

Commonly Caught Species Watercolour on paper 5” x 17” 2013

The Dust We Breathe Watercolour on paper 7.25â&#x20AC;? Diameter 2014

The Dust We Breathe Watercolour on paper 6.75â&#x20AC;? Diameter 2014

A Work about Resistance Watercolour on paper 5â&#x20AC;? x 17â&#x20AC;? 2013

The Dust We Breathe Watercolour on paper 7â&#x20AC;? Diameter 2014

Commonly Caught Species Watercolour on paper 2.5” x 2” 2013

Commonly Caught Species Watercolour on paper 9” x 40.5” 2013

BIODATA

Having grown up in Payyanur, Kerala, Gipin Varghese received his BFA Painting from College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum, MFA Painting from Hyderabad Central University, and finished his PhD on mural and altar paintings of Kerala churches, from MG University, Kottayam, Kerala, in 2010. Recent exhibitions 2013 - Four Works about Resistance | Solo show, Erfrischungsraum, HSLU, Luzern, Switzerland. 2013 - The Embedded Landscapes | Group show in Religare Art Gallery, New Delhi. 2013 - Idea of the sublime | Group show curated by Gayatri Sinha at Lalit Kala Academi by Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi. 2012 - Surveillance on the other end of the spectrum | Solo show in Sakshi Art Gallery, Mumbai. 2012 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Confluence | Group show in David Hall, Fort Kochi. 2012 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Received the FICA Emerging Artist Award. 2010 - On View | Group show in Sakshi Art Gallery, Mumbai.

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