Interestingly, the theme substitutes India for Venice, and explores the core concept of motherland - from within and without. ‘Invisible Cities’ imagines several fictional encounters between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, at the Mongol ruler's court. Polo is supposed to give field reports on the cities within the vast empire as Khan tries to find out why the empire is crumbling.
Polo cannot follow and speak the court's language, and expresses through objects from his baggage like salt fish, drums, necklaces or warthogs' teeth. He points to them all with gestures. He replaces these with words gradually in order to depict the cities. We ear of unjust cities, those being continually constructed, those suspended in the heavens. Finally Khan, like the reader, gets suspicious of the factuality of these tales - and realizes in the end that Polo is returning to one city continuously, that he himself hails from: Venice.
The exhibit starts off by wanting to know: how do artists think of India - often described as being beyond a simplistic definition, open to the Orientalist gaze of international travelers like Marco Polo? Can one see and perceive cities merely through one's own cultural origins? Can one only describe them partially or through powerful metaphor? How do they subvert the closure of inert descriptions of travel guides? As a curatorial note elaborates:
“The show explores these varied notions through a variety of media, created by artists of both South Asian and European extraction, featuring video installation by Gigi Scaria; works on canvas by Jayashree Chakravarty and Sanjay Sundram; etchings byDamon Kowarsky; mixed media work by Devang Anglay, M. Pravat and Dilip Chobisa; sculpture by Pooja Iranna; and digital works on paper by Mahreen Zuberi.”The interesting show continues till July 17, 2010.
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