The second exhibition by The Devi Art Foundation examines the impact of globalisation on Indian art If the inaugural exhibition at Devi Art Foundation highlighted how artists grapple with artwork within the context of society, with the second exhibition, the Lekha and Anupam Poddar collection moves several steps further. Another selection of artwork from their humungous private collection is made public, this time, to examine the impact of globalisation and economic liberalisation on contemporary art in India, in an exhibition titled ‘Where in the World’. The display includes artwork by some internationally renowned Indian artists, while the faculty and students from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, play curator. “We visited the Poddar farm innumerable times in the last year in order to see the entire collection and decide on a theme. Several factors, ranging from the display area to the safety, fragility and sheer size of artwork had to be kept in mind,” says Naman Ahuja, associate professor at the department, as he points to Sheba Chhachhi and Sonia Jabbar’s installation titled When the gun is raised, dialogue stops. Placed in the basement of Sirpur House, the Devi Art Foundation’s red brick structure in Gurgaon, this features testimonies on terrorism and conflict from Kashmiris. “The work is 60-foot long and can’t be displayed in most galleries,” adds Ahuja. The observation applies to several other works on display. Though as a composite, the exhibition aims at providing answers to a range of important questions in a historical context, like, what does new Indian art look like? Whom does it address? How will this era be remembered in the future? The answers are neatly divided into four segments. In ‘Export’, the brief indicates that the collection traces the strategies used by artists asked to enact ‘Indian-ness’ in their work. Placed near the door is a Subodh Gupta fiberglass cow in pink, which is reportedly the first work by the artist acquired by Anupam Poddar, and placed close to it is Sheela Gowda’s Draupadi that has strands of thread attached to sewing needles, suspended from the ceiling. If the grandness of Sudarshan Shetty’s multimedia wall of 1,000 replicas of the Taj Mahal in metal attracts attention, in ‘Outrageous’ the visitor is welcomed with a disclaimer that warns them of the subversive nature of some of the work. So, in a photo installation titled Vilas a naked Subodh Gupta is smeared in Vaseline and reclines on a sofa, and Atul Dodiya has a Mahatma Gandhi oil on canvas behind a metal shutter in B for Bapu. While the curatorial endeavour to examine the ways in which artists engage with the larger public defines ‘Outrageous’, another, ‘Uncollectable’ is about the movement of objects through markets and into private collections. Some of the artworks are unwieldly for private space and provocative for the public realm. However, it is here that we see another popular artwork from Poddar’s collection—Love, Sudarshan Shetty’s life-size model of an antique cream-coloured Jaguar with a giant dinosaur mounting it from behind. From Poddar’s living room, this has shifted to the lower basement of Sirpur House till May when the exhibition ends. Contact : 011-41667474
