ART ANONYMOUS Lakeeren Art Gallery, in association with British Council Library,organised an unusual exhibition - `Anonymously Your's'. It showcased the works of 15 eminent artists who revealed their identity only through their `Art'. Subhalakshmi Shukla offers a first-hand experience of the exhibition. In 1996, Lakeeren - a Mumbai-based art gallery organised an innovative show titled `The Looking Glass Self', which asked artists to introspect and make a work of how they perceived themselves. The exhibition had received a tremendous response and encouraged the gallery to organise more such spontaneous events. The most recent such event was titled, `Anonymously Your's' and the idea of what one keeps inside their drawer, not shown to all, triggered the concept. That the exhibition would hold clues to the identities of the artist, but not reveal the identity was the twist that made the exhibition brief work. An interesting aspect about the exhibition is this enfolding of a visual priority of making objects. Most of the objects on display, here, in the form of shelf, drawer, etc, concealed a painted area to signify some kind of narration within an enveloping space. `Anonymously Your's' is probably the artist's self, who is in a position to disclose one's identity in terms of a dialogue s/he engages with herself or himself that makes her or his presence possible. It is also, perhaps, a secretive interrogation towards one's identity and therefore a self-representation. A multiplicity in attempts to create this visual form for self-identification by remaining silent creates a puzzle for the onlooker who is familiar both with the names as well as the works. Except for the few works of artists like Kaushik Mukhopadhyay and Jehangir Jani that prominently stood out; others expressed themselves in resilience, creating a game of who's who and who's about what! Arunanshu Chowdhary's work that comprised painted surfaces of solid cubes organised like riddle-boxes and set as a continuously transformable visual space, to find new meanings each time, served as thought provoking expressions. These are painted surfaces of eight solid wooden cubes to form a larger cube. The object enfolds itself in various ways to connect one painted surface to another in a new fashion each time. Some boxes were also carved into inserted relief that create an ejecting arbitrary visual like electric wires or a house etc; creating another dimension in the flat painted surfaces. Heeral Trivedi and Anjum Singh's objects also play with the idea of opening and closing where self-revealing is possible. `Emptying myself of images and words ' says the writing on Darshana Vora's empty, black bowl that rotates and floats along the rim of another water-filled larger bowl. A form that is open and not filled with images, but in the process of emptying, is an extremely playful image among the exhibits. Sharmila Samant's `Nine hundred and fifty grams of impulses' is as sensitive and self-reflexive as the mixture of thermocol and metal balls filled in the tray within the drawer. The table is made of wood and painted metal dividing the form and the design in two halves. The center of the table shows this inside tray filled with mixture of balls, through the transparent glass. She chooses, ironically, 950gm, which is the weight of a woman's brain to express the impulses. Jehangir Jani's centrality of the square displays a mouth, very significantly engaged within a frame of sharpened nail-like small rods in a row. Signifying the consumability involved in the expression of desire, a quotation of that along with an encouragement; creates a display of diametrically opposite placed instincts. Shakuntala Kulkami suggests a completion of the self in the unity of fragments within oneself. A section of one's face is reflected in each box when opened; all placed on a kind of table. The boxes are numbered and one is to follow the instructions on the wall for the mentioned number. The attempt is to distort the geometrically of the boxes and the table is painted in monochrome black. Amod Damle brings us a singular cube surface, with instructions to stand at a particular point for viewing. The two painted surfaces adjacent to each other form an interior (corner) of the room, extending into the physical space around the box in the form of wooden blocks that eject out of these painted surfaces. One of the wooden blocks when pulled opens into a drawer, the other one is fixed. This action displaces the interior space of the room created on the surface of the box by showing receding walls in perspective. An `interior' painted on the 'exterior' of an object and its displacement to find an empty drawer within the box is a playful engagement for the onlooker. To think of the history of `illusionism' in the study of `perspective' and `painting' as medium for its exploration; Amod has played successfully with the idea. Kaushik Mukhopadhyay's `Closed Case' connects to his other objects of working with everyday urban waste. Here, it is a VIP briefcase with a guarantee card and a diary. The diary shows the reworked images by the artist on the human anatomy, where one of the pages is a comment on the fossilisation of human instincts. AtuI Dodiya's `remains of the day' makesdisplay of actual human bones along with rat traps while he quotes the popularly known TV serial 'Kaun Banega Crorepati? Whereas Prabhakar Kolte makes an enclosure space with two umbrellas facing the empty spaces together hung from the ceiling to display art-shirts. A multiplicity of visual languages brought together in a common space, the purpose being so, makes the event more than anything else, an inquisitive one. About the author: Subhalakshmi Shukla is part of the teaching faculty at Kamala Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute, Mumbai design in focus August 2000 Indian Architect and Builder |
 |
 |
 |