‘Sincere’ and other works by Yamini Nayar

Yamini Nayar is known to work with installation as photography. She creates highly imaginative psychologically laden interiors in boxes of cardboard. They are destroyed once the work is photographed, so that the image acts as a stand-in for the original piece. In representing invented spaces as still images, any sense of scale is apparently concealed from the viewer.

The interiors seem destroyed by acts of nature. One gets to see the glimpse of her talent at ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ show of contemporary Indian art in London’s Saatchi Gallery. For example, in her ‘Underfoot and Overhead’ a disheveled staircase precariously falls from a doorway with a thread of foliage dangling over the darkened entrance. A single light bulb probably illuminates a darkened room. The work draws its title from a Rudyard Kipling poem.

The artist’s oeuvre often refers the work of famous German artist Thomas Demand, known for his paper interiors. Once photographed, they allude to something significant having taken place. Her fictionalized interiors like ‘Sincere’ are unlike Demand’s work; they are less a reconstruction from recent history and offer an insight into the artist’s imagination. She makes use of both made and found objects apart from images sourced from architectural design, cinema, mass media and photographic archives to create these interiors.

In another work, she conceives a miniature room made of paneled glass and fake columns with coat hangers. The uneven walls and the floor resemble a kitsch corner designed for idle recreation. A bamboo stick in the center of the photograph juts from the wall along with a lampshade shaped like a beehive. She explains that her photographic works is like a series of ‘constructed miniature dioramas, which reference imaginary domestic interiors. They are filled with representations of artifacts, objects and other elements.’