Riyas Komu and others explore ‘The Dark Science of Five Continents’

Gallery BMB, a new ambitious art space, presents its inaugural exhibition. The exhibition, entitled ‘The Dark Science of Five Continents’ (21 September – 7 November 2009), marks a significant chapter for the Indian art world, as a press release put it.

The participating artists are Jake and Dinos Chapman, Jon Kessler, George Osodi, Wang Qingsong and Tunga, and our very own Riyas Komu. Their individuated and often nuanced practices have been critically received and with their visionary morphism, they have articulated a re-examination of atrocity within our rapidly mutating epoch.

The exhibition, like the gallery, is geared to speak of our times.A curatorial note mentions: “The artists’ visual notation provides a contemporary global anthology of assumptions falling apart, of places in jeopardy and ensuing disasters; their visionary inquisitions result in death tropes which climax as portrayals of our perplexing times in an anxious blend of materials and positions.

The innocent visitor’s casual visits to the gallery in order to search for some kind of meaning in these contracting times can become affected by their gestalt response to our wounded generation, for whom inane trust has been replaced by an ever-increasing gradation of excusatory national iniquities.

The artists’ proclivious vigilance, often viewed as granite-hardened nihilism, provides a forceful series of positions by which to examine the malpractices of contemporaneous global re-adjustments in all areas of our realities.These artists remain highly qualified in articulating a raw semblance of sexually violated spaces, as well as allowing for a prolonged look at the reality that results in our quest for a world in mass consumption.

In these works, the use of aesthetics charged with its soul-searching context allows us to go beyond posturing in encountering art; it is even fashioned in jeopardy to further threaten our terms of engagement and to affront us in realizing the malaise. From cultic symbolism, scientific meandering sources and exploited bodies that float in philosophic predicaments, a dark science of five continents and a tonsure of humanity emerges…