Galleries are the places where a work of art is presented in a supposedly neutral context for aesthetic appreciation in tranquility. In this ideal/idealistic definition what we fail to recognize is the ideological role of the galleries and their premises that comes to play a major role in the production of meanings, values and paradigms of monetary exchanges.
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In a country where art has been a part of life since earliest days of civilisation, professionally run art galleries came into existence post-independence.
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It all started with my artist friend Anjum Singh looking for a photograph of her mother Arpita Singh with fellow artist and friend Nilima Sheikh. The two had been friends for years and barely had photographs together.
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A Dream Villa photographer exchanged her dowry to study photography in America in 1988. On her return to India, she met a very unique eunuch in Old Delhi and 13 years later, they made Myself Mona Ahmed. Mona wrote her life story in the form of e-mails to the Scalo publisher, Walter Keller. The book was released by the Swiss ambassador in the graveyard where Mona now lives.
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The beauty of this whole project is that it does not lie within the confines of a sketchbook.
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For collector Max Modesti, an Italo-French fashion designer who has been living in Mumbai for over a decade, collecting art is about acquiring slices of the artist’s life. As a collector who began at the tender age of 15, his first love was Venetian glass from the 50s and 60s.
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Shilpa Gupta’s art is provocative and theatrical. Employing video, performance, hand-crafting, photography, installation and more, she raises bold questions and invites the viewer to participate in making, and interact with her exhibited art-works.
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As one turns the pages over slowly, the poignant portrait of Mona Ahmed in dishabille seizes the eye. Her sari twisted pathetically around her middle, she looks up beseechingly towards the camera and points to the bruises on her thighs.
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A love story that didn’t happen, a bowl of boiling water that isn’t actually boiling, a setting that doesn’t exist – such are the fictions that make up ‘This is Unreal’, a group show of works by RAQS Media Collective (RMC), Yamini Nayar and Susanta Mandal held at Experimenter.
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The seven Indian and international artists in the show sourced from diverse aspects of film and the photographic image without even addressing cinema verite directly, but Merali was able to make the viewer recognise a number of strands that deep down linked with this heritage and in a manner admitted their debt to it.
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