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| From Baroda Annual Show |
The final year students’ display in the faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda, is a much-awaited annual event despite the scorching heat and communal violence and it included paintings, graphic works and sculptures. The exhibit is an important event for more reasons than one. The days of display were busy, with the gallery buzzing with people, the public and award organisations along with leading artists, alumni of the faculty, all of whom seem to be rushing in for an artistic experience. The campus transformed itself into a gallery space of a rare kind.
Like every year, this year too, the students were coming out with new languages evolved through a process of thought and visual execution that took shape over the year. And how they take shape varies from department to department: for example, the sculpture department has a sticking board for each student where he or she pins up ideas that spring from their thought process then and there. They are expected to meditate upon such ideas continuously and derive a visual language that gives birth to the art object.
This year, as could be expected in such an atmosphere, most of the works in the painting department covered a range of experience. There were a large number of works done by women artists that were based upon their experiences, bodily expressions and psychological planes. The works of Kruthi, Piyali, Rupal Dave and Malavika spoke widely about the terrains of feminine expressions. Kruti made textile patterns and used embroidery on the surface of the canvas, reminding one about the ideas of feminism as advocated by Judy Chicago and Rozika Parker.
Piyali’s works played with women, animals and interiors. The continuous presence of draperies in her work, both decorative and transparent, explored the inner space of womanhood combining it with the metaphors and ‘visual alliterations’ of female sexuality.
The figurative is capable of touching up the inner currents of a woman’s personal life when it comes to Rupal Dave’s work. Her figures were often camouflaged under the surface of chequered and designed fabrics wherein the transgressive portrayal of the menstrual blood wooing out of the genitals was shown suggestively. Apart from her year-long works, she also displayed an installation made of plain white cloth with figures that hung on to its surface giving the appearance of screen printing and making the figures emanate a sense of vulnerability. Though the narrative was simple and powerful, the human figures at times lacked anatomical perfection. I would, however, say that such imperfections did not mar our experience in view of the overall contextual placement.
Malavika’s works were colourful and highly textured by way of the decorations. They had lonely figures wandering in the street and the interiors of buildings. There existed a strong sense of perspective with shadows and powerful portrayal of minute objects in detail. The individuals that were portrayed were not necessarily of the same gender; at times it was a boy in half pants and at times it was a girl in a frock looking out for fun and frolic.
Then there were students like Prantik whose work was completely different from the rest, both by choice of its theme as well as material incorporation. Prantik’s works bore a statement that was largely critical of globalisation and at the same time played around with the new media and globalised visual imageries. In one of his works, he displayed an array of food items that belong to various countries like Mexico, Spain, India, etc., in boxes thrown into fish tank-like structures, As a result, the art work frolics with colourfulness and playfully dramatised the globalising culture, that is all pervasive merging borders and questioning ethnicities. His works mirrored the amusement venues and the theme parks for kids that dot suburbs of metropolitan towns. In one of the paintings, the mouth of the rhino that sticks out of the canvas in the shape of toilet commode at the bottom of a colourful city scape is quiet unique and quiet out of place in the ethnic and traditional conventionalities of art. In another painting, the Puppet Hanuman hanging in the middle of the half circle, which is the space created by cutting out the canvas, is made to resemble the underside of a bridge or culvert. Beneath the hanging Hanuman, the decorative designs and the arrows of advertisement clarity are again quiet unlike the ethnic invoking attempts of the art of earlier times. Rather here, they put in to question the mythic and the modern through their playful togetherness.
When the post-graduate students stay different from the dominant trend in the present art scene, which is mediatic realism, the undergrad students seem to be holding on to it. The work of Posha Patel in which she captured her friend’s circle and that of Neeba are of the current trend that has caught up and is said to be dominant among Bombay artists. The works of Amitav were, however, kitsch and pop art style.
The sculpture department’s work was highlighted by Vyom who is a final year undergraduate student. He made an image of a man sitting on a bench with a theatrical background of a cloth screen. The works of Atul and Sanjeeva in MFA Sculpture were also notable. Atul’s work makes use of the reproduction of his self-portrait. He makes his portrait in a transparent glass like material. The material is sandwiched in the middle of rubber flowers and filled with a colourful liquid. He has developed a contraption by which a viewer can tilt the work tilt and change its colour. The work is suggestive of the effect of the society’s power on an individual. Atul’s work bagged the Bodhi award. Sanjeeva painstakingly caste in bronze the everyday objects like books, bottles and cigarette cases that bring in the negative and positive images of object (sometime the objects themselves) embedded on to the surface of the sculpture, mimicking the archival anxieties of the consumer culture. His questions on the cultural codes, politics of dressing are quiet clear in the work’s three-dimensional expression.
Two works of Ved Gupta bring the corporate culture into sharp criticism. In one, we see crows sitting around the conference table–an image of carnivorous capitalism? In another, we find toilet seats arranged around the conference table in the place of normal chairs.
The graphic works of A. Sivaruban, Karishma and Dev were interesting. Dev portrayed himself in different avatars like Saddam Hussain and Osama Bin Laden, an eruption of multiple personality disorder in all its playfulness. The work of Naveen, who bagged an award from the Bodhi Art Gallery was a digital print. There were more works of photography and photo etching that occupied the graphics space this year as compared to the earlier years.
Two awards were announced during the exhibition. One was the Nasreen Mohammedi award and the other the Bodhi award. They were decided by a jury that included Jitish Kallat, Nancy Adajania, Anandjitray, Ranjit Hoskote, Surendran Nair, Vasudevan Akkitam and Srilekha Sikander. While the Bodhi Art Award was bagged by Atul and Naveen, Sona Tina from the painting department and Anandita and Gowtam from the undergrad department bagged the Nasreen Mohammedi award.
The awareness of marketability among the students was evident in their works, be it on mediatic realism or questioning global culture or even issue-based works like takes on feminism. The resurgence of the market has resulted in trends being set at both the ends of art, that is the artist and the consumer. However, the need for market driven innovation and uniqueness put the exhibition into different limits of presentable technicalities that are more a reflection of globalisation and an accompaniment of capitalistic aesthetics than that of the creative evolution that had sustained an inherent artistic thought process in earlier times. Looking back to the grand old days of Baroda when artists like Rekha Rodwittiya, Bhupen Khaker and Gulam Sheikh evolved new styles as creative exploration, the new trend is a little alarming in its concentration towards presentability that is held above the conceptual and formal foundations of art. This is not to say that there was any dearth of creativity. The question is how many of the works displayed were original and uncontrived.
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