KOCHI: Awesome! Each painting on the wall, each video has many things to say about life. How relocation or migration takes you away from your roots to an alien land which you may or may not call your own. Where curiosity about one’s ancestral culture blooms and beckons and an identity crisis stares you in the face. A crisis that’s difficult to outgrow. This has been explored in artistic and meaningful ways by eight South Asian artists.
Hetain Patel, Fawad Khan, Swati Khurana, Mequitta Ahuja, Divya Mehra, Vandana Jain, Rajkamal Kahlon and Anna Bhushan _ born i n t o one culture, bre d in another,working in yet another. Such a mix of cultures often creates conflicts.
However universal one might try to be, questions about parents, religion, caste, race are reminders of one’s identity. The works titled ‘Wonder what The Others Are Upto’ at Gallery OED trigger interesting dialogue.
Hitain Patel uses his body to express his deepest thoughts. Though British born, he is fascinated by the land of his roots and attempts to express the rich culture through his body, the temple of the soul. Through a video of four self-portraits he shows how the body is linked to the whole universe. Colourful rituals with lofty symbolic connotations are treated amazingly. The images of four torsos and the dexterous hand movements depict the depth of his understanding of his roots. The rhythmic clapping of the hands and the ‘thalam’ have music and dance emerging. The rituals of ‘kumkum’ and mehndi _ applying, erasing or fading with time _ are thought-provoking.
The tattoo-like application of mehndi on his body, the beautiful designs, the mustache and hair or the clean shaven and tonsured look, seem to represent the conflicts within.
The same conflicts are treated in a different way by Mequita Ahuja.
Her colourful works focus on the cultural aspects of Africa. She too speaks the language through the body with great emphasis on the hair and its relevance to her and the culture she is bred into.
Anna Bhushan goes deeper - into the internal organs of the human being - to convey her feelings and thoughts and links these parts to the womb of the universe. How the body or mind is read according to the colour, features and the societal conditioning, biases and the resulting pain and torture find voice in the other works. Fawad Khan uses automobiles, vintage and new, and shows how they are the targets of explosion and terrorism.
Pain oozes out of the video and digital projection of torture in Guantanamo Bay in Rajkamal Kahlon’s psychoanalytical work ‘Aktion with a Male Body: Notes from Schwarzjoglet to Shahzada.’ Swati Khurana’s works are personal narratives which explore immigrant issues.
Divya Mehra has compiled some videos on YouTube to project how the mockery of certain communities is laid bare in a humorous way. She uses humour and brings to light the trauma of the divide. With tea stain on paper Vandana Jain makes a tea menagerie in which she depicts 12 pieces symbolising famous commercial brands to show the mechanical aesthetics of corporate logos and the complexities of the human-corporate relationship.
Curated by Meenakshi Thirukode, the show will run through May 9.
surekha@epmltd.com