In a familiar place, look for the unfamiliar.” These words, pasted on the wall beside the entrance of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in Saket, are what welcome you to the exhibition inside. The prompt, along with 16 others like it, pop up across the museum - on the glass facades, windows, restrooms, near the escalator, and many other unexpected places in the adjacent mall - and is part of American artist David Horvitz’s exhibit titled ‘Change the Name of Days’. It calls you to “imagine the world differently”.
The ideas of exploration, engagement and play that propel Horvitz’s work are also the interweaving themes of ‘Very Small Feelings’, an exhibition that features works of over 50 artists and art initiatives, including Horvitz’s, and is an act of remembrance. Of childhood.
All at Play
"Very Small Feelings’ aims to access that place inside us where there is a glow of discovery and realisation. It uses different prompts to turn the museum into a playground and creative space for intergenerational conversations," says Akansha Rastogi, senior curator at KNMA, who co-curated the exhibition along with Diana Campbell, chief curator of the Dhaka Art Summit.
Inside, adults are keenly putting together pieces of jigsaw puzzles, while children make drawings of lizards and frogs. Opposite a wall with framed artwork, people are jumping on trampolines. Everywhere you turn, visitors are having a good time - they are at play.
One work that stands out, almost filling up an entire room, is Belly of the Strange, an installation by the architect duo Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty of Mumbai.
The smooth womb-like structure made of wood, holds within it ‘strange’ books from different geographies, both real and fictional. The Belly…has taken various shapes in other parts of the world, where it was erected before. In its third iteration at KNMA - previously displayed in Spain and Bangladesh - this “place for daydreaming” invites viewers to rest in its bright red oval inside and think up strange worlds. “It is also a place to get silly,” says Rastogi, “You can shout inside it. It has great acoustics.”
The Art of a Child
The exhibition is deeply participatory in nature. It is “half done work”, as Rastogi puts it, “and gets completed only with visitors’ voluntary engagement”. A wall, at the just concluded exhibition, filled with wonderfully weird papier mache masks made by children from NCR-based care homes during various programmes conducted by Artreach India, beckons viewers to try them on and see who they become. Another wall, displaying the work of artist Sanjoy Chakraborty of Dhaka, is half occupied with cutouts from Bangladeshi newspapers and children’s magazines from the ’60s, with the other half left for visitors to draw on as they like.
The call has been enthusiastically responded to, and the space has transformed into a colourful canvas of unrestrained self-expression. The exhibition is an ode to the childish urge to imagine and create; it does not discriminate among artistic attempts. For instance, there hangs a frame showing just a few random lines and smudges creation of a three-year-old given colouring pencils. The child was figuring out what could be done with the instruments given to her, an attempt that was, for Leela Mukherjee, the late sculptor and educator, under whose tutelage it was made, the purest artistic impulse.
The adage “nothing is older than a child” had struck Rastogi as peculiar. “On one level, it hints at the idea of growing and growth in a circuitous way, how we come back to the childlike,” she explains. “On another level, it treats the child as a historical and playful cultural unit. The exhibition expands this idea through its storytelling potential.”
Variety Fair
“Very Small Feelings’ is like a cloth with threads left loose at the ends, so that people can pick them up and weave their own patterns and stories, says Swati Kumari a member of the curatorial team and also an artist who works with textiles. She is particularly fond of the work of artist Afra Eisma of Hague, whose Poke Press Squeeze Clasp is a splendid display of human-sized dolls made of cloth, lying on a floor covered in colourful tapestry. “Feel and cuddle and gently engage with the artwork,” reads a note beside it.
Sashi from Nagaland, a college student visiting the exhibition, says that it is for everyone who likes art, no matter the age. “I love the variety here. There are works in every medium, from comic strips to sculptures. It is interesting because while some are silly, some are sort of dark,” she says.