Gods, humans and the joy of it all

GAYATRI SINHA

Delhi's palette had something for everybody this past week. From Jagannath Panda works to Atul Bhalla, everybody had something to say.

VENERATION OF WATER An eye-catching work by Atul Bhalla

Any art exhibition can represent two time frames, the first being the cycle in which the artist has made the work, the second being societal time if you like, in which the work is located. The paintings of Jagannath Panda - Nature Morte Gallery - are illuminated by their teasing play between the erasure of time and its insistent presence. In the works, moral propositions suggest themselves, by the individual as witness/inhabitant of these spaces, as rightful legatee of the resources of water, earth, air to a state of somewhat cynical spectatorship.

Jagannath has engaged in a circuitous journey, from a rooted Vaishnav culture in Puri where his father was a priest at the Jagannath temple, to a residency in Japan and a scholarship in the U.K. to his life as an artist living on the faultlines of private and commercial enterprise between Delhi and Gurgaon. The images are, as is in the most interesting art, inconclusive. Pools and eddies of water spill on an uninhabited apartment floor perhaps presaging human presence. An aerial view in another painting reveals close clusters of houses, pools of oil slick on roads and surges of crows, in an unpeopled apocalypse.

In yet another work, a Gurgaon style mall building façade, sharp and vertical in black glass witnesses Ravan in apparent descent teetering on the edge of survival. Indeed if Jagannath brings in human forms it is in the form of gods plastered on the walls of these new erect structures, gods abandoned even by the labour that built these buildings, now paltry and two dimensional in their bright calendar colours.

The main protagonists in these works are animal forms, swarming ants, crows both banal and menacing and the ubiquitous dog as friend and domestic creature who marks out territorial zones for survival. The dog appears in a series of sculptures encased in the plush textiles of domestic usage. The pleasure in the viewing of these works is in the pungent aftertaste of the unexpected combination of seemingly everyday elements rendered with a touch that is masterly playful and light.

Atul Bhalla's show

The polemic around water has grown in proportion to the anxiety around this resource. India's own veneration of water has been encoded in a continuous arc from Rig Vedic veneration of the river goddesses, Bharati, Ila and Sarasvati, and as subject of art from Gupta period sculptures of the Ganga and Yamuna to the photographs of Raghubir Singh or Viswanadhan's film Water.

In the present period however, the economies of control and distribution of India water by governments and corporations, shortage and pollution establishes another fraught and contested area. But what about water and the person, water and the self, or the resource as body fluid? Atul Bhalla's exhibition Immersions - Anant Art Gallery - treads the fine line poetry and polemic in a way that reveals a slow gestation and considered response to the subject. Bhalla personalises the experience of water. A series of photographs that records the tonsuring of his hair, or bathing in the Yamuna renders these apparently ritual acts desacralised. The sediment in the river appears to take the form of numerous vessels, predicating perhaps the ultimate fear of the river's conversion into dry sand flats. In the ultimate irony it is these bottles that mimic bottled water made of Yamuna sand that are preserved in water in glass cases like museum objects.

Bhalla culminates a series of works - photographs, sculpture and an installation in a series of drawings on objects that afford an inflow and outflow of water all of which bear the names of body parts. Clearly the artist succeeds in raising the issues that complicate resource utilization. The artist uses the different media at his disposal but with a modesty and economy of scale that is completely disarming. It with a sense of poignancy that he conveys the position of the individual, confronted by loss and escalating change in a world in which the questions far outnumber the answers.

Architecture in Video

Arquitecturas Mexicanas - Architecture in Video curated by Miguel Adria, editor of the international magazine Arquine opened over the weekend at the Apeejay Media Gallery.

Over and above Juan O'Gorman's modernist designs for the studios of Diego Riviera and Frida Kahlo, very little is known in India about the developments within Mexican architecture. This exhibition, essentially academic in approach, introduced the work of masters like Luis Barragan as well as ten contemporary leading architects, making visible Mexico's engagement with modernity and urbanism. As a specialist area this is not easy viewing; the subject requires a fuller context than a video viewing can afford. But the subtext in an Indian context would be Mexico's own assertion of urban and artistic identity, its integration of art and environment within architecture, and perhaps most importantly its resistance to and absorption of American influences.

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