Superhighway for Indian Art

Denise Robinson

David Lynch’s film ‘Lost highway’ might be a more apposite metaphor for considering an exhibition of work of contemporary art from India. Lynch’s dream-like forms, disturbing physic spaces and non-linear temporality may bring us closer to the works in this exhibition.

The curators initiated this exhibition to “[Follow] the remarkable and rapid economic, social and cultural developments in India in recent years, Indian Highway is a timely presentation of the pioneering work being made in the country today… a snapshot of a vibrant generation of artists…’ The highway for them has a double meaning: to include the information super highway - of significance in a country as vast as India. Many of these artists are not known, others are now well known such as, amongst others, Shilpa Gupta, Amar Kanwar and the Raqs Media Collective.

Nemesis of Nation

Given the significance of the information superhighway for this exhibition it’s curious that many of these artists look to recently outmoded technologies. Shilpa Gupta’s, The Nemesis of Nation re-visits history through the cultural artefacts of two speeches. These voices are her motif: the presidential address of Mahamud Ali Jinah on the foundation of Pakistan and Nehru’s speech on the granting of India’s independence. Two microphones on either end of a stand resting on a fulcrum - in this instance microphones don’t amplify the voice but emit recorded voices. One voice ‘weighs’ the other, always one in ascent still invoking the crowd. This two armed horizontal microphone see-saws as the voices recede and emerge again with a kind of singing rhythm that scours of the political voice for its contemporary symptoms.

Ayisha Abraham’s short film ‘You are Here’ is one of several video works that suffer from the cramped installation in the areas outside of the main exhibition space. Sequestered in small hallway it is easy to miss. It is all but silent, infused with the patina of time that the Bolex camera provides along with archival footage of documentaries, news, and family films from the 1950’s and 60’s. Fragments that have the quality of the moment when torn from their context. In the same entrance is Kiran Subbaiah’s short film, ‘Flight Rehearsals’, a nicely conceived, digitally manipulated looped video with the one small table as prop for the figure of the artist performing the preparation for a digitally enhanced act of levitation – a nod to the practice in India? or to the work of Bruce Nauman? It is the profound within the joke.

Entropy and Testimonies

Subid Gupta’s installation embalms an entire office area. It’s a reference to the ubiquitous bureaucracy in India, an image of entropy, with the limitless gathering and processing of details undertaken by bureaucracy, epitomised in Gupta’s sculptural morphing of a bursting filing cupboard. Like all of his work it carries contradictory energies.

Filmmaker, Amar Kanwar’s installation is cinematic in its reach, with seven video projections surrounding the beholder, reflecting the documentary filmmakers own desire to lose himself in the image, to not be an observer but a participant. ‘The Lightning Testimonies’ projects a montage of hundreds of shifting images, it could be considered a moving tribute or memory room for new forms to narrate these testimonies to oppression and suffering –of women in the internecine conflicts in India and its regions, whether at the hands of Hindu, Muslim or their own families.

Framing Indian Highway

It is burdensome rhetoric by the curators to claim that the so called younger artists are to be “ …[framed] and contextualised by the new paintings …created for the Serpentine Gallery by India’s most acclaimed living artist, M. F. Husain … India’s most historically significant artist M.F. Husain” any such significance for Husain, self-exiled in the UK due to the dangers he faced for his works’ political protest in India over the past 50 years isn’t fully realised as they are installed by the architects Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Muller in a structure wrapping three sides of the Serpentine in a series of contiguous boxes. These are paintings after all, and have no reference to public space or the context on the exterior of a museum.

Similarly the design intervention by the same architects invited by Raqs Media Collective (RMC) was to create an immersive environment. - painted silver with silver aluminium ladders, while the documentary films were screened onto the silver surface and fixed onto the ladders. The RMC project asked these video makers to do a very interesting thing, to re-enter and re-edit an earlier work, to intercut any idea of a secure representations of an historical moment, some were more successful in this uncanny de-centering, but all were slightly ‘repressed’ by this environment.

An Exhibition in Process

Hans Ulrich Orbrist is known for his desire to develop projects that are not closed but discursive, open, accumulative and generative. To this end this exhibition has a long list of associated events,  open, accumulative and generative. To this end this exhibition has a long list of associated events, including cinema, dance, and literature and will travel to different institutions over four year period – the first being Astrup Fearnely Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, and will bring in other artists and curators along the way. This expansion as a means to prevent a containment of meaning threatens also to produce chaos without a critical focus. In contrast the catalogue is a comprehensive mapping of the scene in India and of India itself, with essays providing a context and debate, such as Geeta Kapur’s analysis of contemporary documentary film and video and its more recent political uses against censorship in India along with other essayists writing on contemporary art in contemporary Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh that indicate the importance of intellectual engagement in this scene.

So this exhibition is incomplete in this sense, and it is not a matter of whether we get lost in this chaos but whether the works selected are able to survive the context and address what is the opposite of an escape from reality, the wish that is always embedded in the dream.