Issues of Home/Nation/location/migration and identity have been key issues explored by Indian artists in recent times.
Home, the exhibit, however is conceived with the intention of mapping internal/intimate spaces – the abode of the private self – through the specially installed environments/artworks by Mayura Subhedar, Minal Damani, Shantamani, Surekha and Prajakta Potnis who live and work in different cities and varying milieus.
Home: a space to recede in, or to gaze out of; a place of comfort or a place of confrontation … home is the abode of reverie or the source of nightmare. This exhibition aspires to evoke emotional climates of memory and recall – a loop in which past and present blur, in keeping with changing emotional/social/political climates. Within each room, drawings, paintings, objects and photographs come together to form highly personal spaces of universal significance.
Anupa Mehta
FOR INDIVIDUAL ROOMS
Load shedding and modak making is an ambitious work involving a opera singer who has sung the libretto I have written, based on newspaper articles on the load shedding phenomenon in the Bombay area. Though this work is not an opera, I have tried to use the narrative, dramatic, operatic elements in the vocal part of this piece. Apart from vocals, this work is about food - the maharastrian delicacy 'modak' plays a very significant part in this work. I consider to be my rich cultural legacy.
This sweet, to my mind, is linked with a sense of contentment, stories, memories and creating. The act of making, the gestures are imprinted on my mind and are an important part of the ritual that is enacted in a contained space - white room measuring 154 cm (my height). Since mid 2007 I have performed, acted, gestured, made rituals in this white room- an essential part of most of my recent video-works. I found this pivotal moment of contentment, confusion, memories and pain linked strongly with the idea of home almost by chance when my mother over telephone said (in Marathi) "modak kase karenaar garam hotya" (How can I make modaks when it,s so hot, it,s hot due to the load shedding). This work is a meditation on the disjunction between the current Indian urban middle class homes with their rich cultural legacy and it,s eviscerated modern present-massive development with mega-malls and gated communities for the burgeoning middle class with all the modern trappings but rationed electricity.
Mayura Subedar
Amsterdam
These two videos and objects in the form of a video installation, intend to evoke a dialectic chat, while addressing the thematic, HOME. One of the videos, Making Home, attempts at picturing a different definition of home, the other video, All I need is a pillow to sleep is about homelessness. Beyond the obvious contradiction, the other possible relation in between is intended, through this installation. Home away from Home is what twentieth century has become accustomed to, by and large. Thus, this set of video teasingly addresses certain sets of pastiches like indoor-outdoor, home-homeless, secured-discomfort etc., This video-installation intends to tackle the homely comfort of viewing, i.e., turn the audience from passive to active. Making Home is a video, which appears as a ˜moving home of its own self, within itself. The narrative explores the typical interiors of a home, leading to a woman sleeping, holding a toy-home-like silhouette. All that has been seen till now, is revealed, again, within that silhouette. The labyrinth of memory makes a home, a home. The geography of a home is its memories and private memoirs. The images of interior of a home to beautiful landscape ends in a blank space in the process, a subtle play of dream and reality. The video, Making Home, intends to point out this shift from the physicality of a given space to the happenings within. This looping of the video and recalling one memory of a lived-space (home) are being equated in the video. A pillow to sleep is a video about a homeless woman, living in Cubbon Park (Bangalore). She has been living there from past forty years, carries all her clothing under her skirt and a small bag is all her property. She is not bothered by the authorities, retains her dignity, doesnt dream anything (according to herself) and more than anything, does not feel insecure for not being able to have a home. A rejection of concept of home /roof with or without a choice.
Surekha
Bangalore
I treat the concept of home as a border: the body, house and earth as a home, a space of dwelling, to nurture growth and creativity. When looking at the issues of survival nowadays, from micro to macro level, life appears to be fragmented, disjointed and contradictory instead of a holistic experience.
As a material, charcoal has gone through the act of being burnt (carbon-ized), and as such represents an in-between stage of matter. Inscribed in it are the earlier stages of a living tree as well as its future, whereby matter gets dissolved and becomes ash. This in-between stage of exhaustion, burnt out and dissolution, becomes a metaphor for the present living conditions in our big growing cities. Carbon, which once played a vital role in the formation of life on earth, has become a threat as carbon monoxide. The nurturer has turned hostile. The home in which we live is not safe any more; the mother who nurtures the next generation is burnt up; the cloud that fertilizes the earth with rain is ridden with acid and toxic waste; the ashen content has become container. This set of works tackles contemporary issues such as homelessness, violence, pollution of the environment and the fragmented, insecure lives we live today in such a context.
Shanthamani
Bangalore
Home, a space so confined and intimate is broken in to more confined and intimate spaces. The walls inside multiply to make more private spaces. Lay out of a floor plan always reminds me of maze, with all its magnitude of encompassing a vast world inside. In this space of a home we learn our first lesson of life, lessons of sharing and co-existence. But I am confused whether we share this space or we divide. The landscape is broken into homes and homes broken in to private rooms. This particular installation titled It broke while shifting suggests re-arrangement of home in another space. I have used the image of broken floor as a metaphor for the land shared and divided by borders. The floor removed from its original space broke into pieces while arranging in a new home. There are around fifty 12 X12 pieces with image of mosaic tiles. Further these pieces are broken in to shapes resembling a map. This work is an expression of my journey from my home town Mumbai to Baroda and about getting conscious of the existing borders, which went unnoticed till you crossed them.
Minal Damani
Mumbai
My work grows from the realm of the domestic/ private space, where one encounters the mundane, by transforming these everyday surroundings into fantastical situations I try to create delusions from the numbness experienced in everyday living. The area of my work breeds between the intimate world of an individual and the world outside, which is separated only by a wall where life grows / decays, similar to “a still life†within an interior space wherein the “still†wall transforms as a veil and also as organic separations between the inside and the outside world. I dwell on the fragility and disregard experienced in everyday living to draw an intimate viewpoint to echo the complex psychological character/attitude of people living within the four walls of a house or a city.
Prajakta Potnis
Mumbai |
