Expect the unexpected. Nothing is as it seems. Can a hand pump spout a gardener’s shears, or an axe wear a clothes iron as a hat? Can a sitar come with a showerhead and a trumpet with a tap? And yet, the absurd plays out on our roads and in our cities–-in loose cables and chaotic streets, in honking at traffic lights and concrete on riverbeds. All around us, we live in these paradoxes we call urban life. Delhi-based architect and artist Gautam Bhatia’s (73) exhibition ‘All the Beauty in the World’, which opened on October 12 at Bikaner House and presented by Weft Foundation, a non-profit, disrupts our everyday assumptions by reimagining the ordinary through the absurd. In his four decades of practice as an architect and critic, Bhatia has consistently questioned the disconnect we have with our surroundings–-how our insular living has left our neighborhoods bare. With residential, institutional, recreational, hospitality, and heritage projects in his portfolio, Bhatia has long been an artist and observer of India’s urbanity through both books and exhibitions. In this ongoing show, he uses everyday objects–from taps to kitchenware, tennis rackets to typewriters, cameras to milk canisters–-to suggest multiplicity and uncertainty all at once. If his work ‘Domestic Violence’ fuses an old-fashioned coal iron with an axe, ‘Waste Removal’ features a baby stroller fitted with a urinal, while ‘Symphony in Hammer and Saw' presents a sitar stripped of strings and melded with worker tools. “I’ve been working on formalized bronze sculptures and wanted to try a range of new materials and objects. Most objects by themselves don’t tell a story–-be it a chair, a tap, an axe, or a clothes iron–but when two diverse objects are fused together, they begin to suggest some heinous idea or exaggerated thought,” says Bhatia. Take ‘Shoot the Messenger’, for instance, where a gun sits atop a typewriter. “The idea was not to smash two things together but to work out the joinery in such a way that the two come together. With the typewriter, which has a gun lodged in it, it would have been easy to paste the gun on top, but I had the gun divided into two parts–the stock and the barrel–soldered into the typewriter carriage so it looked like it belonged there,” he explains. Incidentally, when one clicks the space bar, the carriage moves with the ‘loaded’ gun. In the silence of his sculptures, there are words one must hear–of a police state where voices are measured and muzzled, where a cycle pump at the end of a trumpet can only mean cacophony, where a designer tap washes away what the press should iron out. Bhatia cleverly punches puns into his work, melding the tragic, the comic, the hyperbolic, and the dramatic into his messaging. In his note, he writes, “I have always felt that the search for art works best when you ask the wrong questions–-indirect or misdirected ones.” The exhibition is as much about the injustice of labour as it is about pervasive violence among communities and between man and nature. It conveys a message of “fusion and discomfort, rebirth and dissection.” This is not the first time the absurd has been explored in art–-writers like Albert Camus did it with the ‘Sisyphus tale’, Franz Kafka with ‘The Metamorphosis’, Samuel Beckett with ‘Godot’. In this show, Bhatia confronts the audience not just with pen and drawing but with the molding of extremes. Here, the unspoken is deeply felt, and isolation viscerally experienced. “In our country, the idea of irony and paradox doesn’t seem to hold any value. People want messages to be clear, in black and white. But the idea of the exhibition is to muddy the waters and make stupidity an actual message. Hopefully, between the stupid and the ironic, people will discover there is more,” says Bhatia. The show closes on October 17.
