Most of Shilpa’s works turn semiotic relationships imagined in objects upside down. The spinning doors never close, they perpetually keep opening. The microphone itself doesn’t speak much, but almost completes its story through the photograph. The electronic LED signage equivocally announces one’s east as another’s west. The fragmented queues queued together into a reel merely combine many people. The safety airplane straps don’t tie one down, they bind themselves into a ball that may freely roll on. This conceptual and often formally observed circularity that Shilpa employs in her works essentially emphasizes her dialectical method. It allows us, rather, pushes us to turn the questions back to the objects (and their materiality) that they would otherwise pose us.
The everyday of a city is phenomenologically experienced in its roundness. In its repetition, revolve and regularity, the urban environment embroils us within a structure of the round. (To be sure,) did I not do today, what I exactly did yesterday? Woke up by the alarm, swung the door and stepped out, queued up before the travel, walked the same journey along the shop-lines…and all again in reverse until I am back home? Shilpa’s works in fact seem to question this ritualistic roundness of city life by ceasing the objects from encrypting their performances within our bodies and lives. In her reconfigurations, she challenges the memories through which objects we encounter regularly end up driving us.
It is perhaps in this physical winding and the conceptual unwinding through which new spaces are perceived and habituated. The dialectical play constructed by these objects shift and slide us into multiple geographies, physical or mental, reminding us about our experiences in different places we may have been. While these phenomena and objects define the experience of most cities, the carefully configured rearrangements loop us into a process that triggers a comparison between one geography versus the other. It is through these instruments (apparatus) that one city reminds me of another.
http://www.shilpagupta.net/Public/Work/97/100-Queues
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Abhay Sardesai invited me to respond to Shilpa Gupta's work recently for an art event organized by Art India at Jindal Mansion. The program for the curatorial theme "This City Reminds me of Another" was jointly organized by the University of Warawick, UK and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. The event aimed to look at works of five different artists whose works intersects with the above theme. I was a respondent to contemporary Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta's work. Other artists amongst the presenters were Sudhir Patwardhan, Gieve Patel and Tushar Pandey. Hema Upadhyay who was also invited wasn't able to make it.
The event aimed to challenge the conventional setting of a panel discussion through which art often gets discussed. For yesterday's evening, Abhay interfused artists' works with poetries and structured responses. About two poetries and two respondents were put together with each artist's work. The respondents were from different backgrounds of art (Sahej Rahal), architecture (myself), anthropology (Rashmi Varma), literature (Brinda Bose), film (Anjali and Jayashankar Monteiro) and social sciences (Shekhar Krishnan). One got to listen to different views on the artist's works.
It was a treat, as always, to listen and observe the works of artists Sudhir Patwardhan and Gieve Patel, as much as Shilpa Gupta. Sudhir showed a series of paintings, and perhaps one of his new works trying to extract the idea of the "other" within the city. Showing his series of paintings on Ulhasnagar, he went on to say, "The city can surprise you in many ways". Showing images of everyday environments being taken over suddenly by new developments, the city brings to us a surprise. This change makes you experience otherness. Sudhir kept on bringing paralles betweenthe imagery of his work with different artists in other parts of the world. For example, his invocation of Edward Hopper's work, Canaletto "Grand Canal" in Venice, Andrea Mantegna - all attempted to reinforce the theme of the talk. The impressionistic frames of paintings made by him and the other artists pushed him to imagine that he was certainly thinking of other cities (through his experiences of images) while producing his own works. Sudhir's third proposition was that the city surprises you in "its projection of the future". All such aspects of change, surprise and projected imageries make us experience otherness within our own city. He said that the fear that this city (in which you live) could become another place, is another otherness that one experiences.
While Anjali and Jayshankar pointed out in their response that Sudhir's work is gentle and yet seen through a non-sentimental gaze and if one could propose that Sudhir is performing a "critical radiology" (Jayashankar's take through his knowledge of Sudhir as a doctor), Sahej brought out that there was no "cinematic time" in his images. It is that in-between time which most of us have seen the city in. It is the city which we all experience in between our commute, while traveling, moving. The light doesnot dramatize or change the space we see, rather places us within it in a critical way.
Gieve Patel presented his works exploring the "street as home". One of his works captured two men standing against a wall with a blue patch behind them. The patch, Gieve mentioned, was meant to show peeling paint. However, what he got interested in eventually is that the shape of the patch looked like a map. This juxtaposition of the two men against a map of "no-place" gave another dimension to the thematic of the evening. Gieve showed his famous "Letter back home" speaking of the labour from Andhra who during those days of the '80s would ask the educated to write their stories to send back home. He ended with a beautiful story/painting of a
man holding a peacock. The story goes that the peacock must have climbed down the Malabar Hill over the night and landed in an office lobby at Marine drive by the morning. When the keeper of the office opened the door, he was pleasantly surprised to see a peacock in the office. He immediately called up his boss to say "Sir, there is a peacock in our office!" The boss's response was much urgent. He directed him "Call the Times of India" - and so he followed. The Times of India published in 1960s, a black and white picture of the man holding a peacock in his office lobby standing against the sea framed by the large window (as directed by the boss over phone!). Gieve's painting is merely a colour rendering of this picture/story, a story, which Gieve thought, would probably never happen in the city again!
Shekhar Krishnan and Brinda Bose responded to Gieve's works in unique ways. Shekhar, in the spirit of Jayashankar's spirit called for Gieve's paintings to be medical/biological poetry (again invoking Gieve's profession as a doctor).
Shilpa showed a lot of works, many that I was aware of, but hadn't included in my short review. She informed how the period of her learning art, between 1992-97 was a contested time in the history of Mumbai city - with the communal riots and the ingress and foray of new ideas and technologies during the period when liberalization began to affect the city and its people. Such politically sensitive environment finds poignant expression in Shilpa's works that uses different media to bring out several layers of meanings. Shilpa however explains that the media she uses is not central to her works, rather, the content of what she wants to express or evoke, is. I must appeal that people must look up
her work online to get a better understanding.
It was followed by my response already shared in the beginning above. Rashmi Varma graciously added to my response reinforcing some points, and reading out Walter Benjamin, a quote that befit her works quite well but I fail to remember!
The evening ended with Tushar Pandey's performance. He explained that in order to think through the theme "one city reminds me of another", the relationship with that "one city" was extremely important. While the thematic assumed that everyone would have that strong relationship, Pandey said that he was not able to have a consolidate relationship with any city. Thus his idea of the city, and hence the other, itself is fragmented. This threw a new light on the discussion, but also encapsulated the spirit of the times we do live in - a city which is increasingly becoming a no-place, a city that is losing its memories to "surprises" as Patwardhan brought out...
