Through the Kaleidoscope

The exhibition titled ‘India Awakens: under the Banyan Tree’ plays to and subverts some of the cliches that form the rhizome that is India. To open at Austria’s Essl Museum on November 26,it presents the vision of India through the eyes of 34 young and upcoming artists,who have been chosen by curator Alka Pande from Delhi’s India Habitat Centre. “I wanted a meta-narrative of India in all its diversity and with all its contradictions. India is an emerging super power and it’s not to romanticise this but to toss in a variety of different artistic views,” says Pande. Interestingly,the catalogue text has been written by author Mridula Koshi,who talks tangentially of Indians writing in English. “It is a very young kind of writing that doesn’t have a depth to it. One could say that it’s the tip of the iceberg. Is that reflective of the contemporary Indian art scene as well? I do not feel qualified to speak about that,” says Koshi.

The variety of works and generations span young artists like Baptist Coelho,Ayesha Kapur,Remen Chopra,Tarun Jang Rawat and Mahua Sen — who have done installation,photography and mechanical works — to a slightly senior generation of artists like Riyas Komu,George Martin,Vibha Galhotra,Kristine Michael and Zuleikha Chowdhury,who have done a mixture of sculpture,painting,photographic collage site-specific installation and performance based works. A section of the exhibition is dedicated to artists working with traditional folk styles of Madhubani and Mithila style painting on canvas,like Suresh K Nair.

“My attempt is to glorify femininity with religious and functional spaces of Shakti. The ancient sacred mother is a symbol of empowerment and I have tried to reinvent that,” says Chopra whose installation has metallic figures wrapped around a complicated but fictional apparatus. Sen says that she likes to “play with the already existing clichés in Indian pop culture,social divides and stereotypes.” Her video installation captures a Sadhu placed against the scan of an ultrasound,as if he were sitting in the womb of a great earth mother. Tarun Chabbra’s Child as Lord Shiva is a biting yet humorous commentary on popular culture and religion,while Ayesha Kapur’s lovely black and white images capture Bollywood backstage. The exhibition presents a comprehensive package that does not fall into the trap of only projecting established artists to the West.

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