Gallery BMB unveils India's emerging talent

Gallery BMB, located in the heart of Mumbai’s art district presents groundbreaking exhibitions of the very best of Indian and international contemporary art. The venue has emerged as the most noteworthy to showcase many international artists of the highest caliber who, in spite of critical acclaim from major prestigious institutions, have seldom presented their work in this part of the world.

Keen to present emerging Indian artists, Gallery BMB hosted another exciting group show. In this post, we reproduce a part of the essay on Srinivasa Prasad Zakkir Hussain. The former’s work draws a great deal from his background in regional theatre as a prop maker and performer. In his work there exists the drama and compulsion of ritual and a grandiose scale imprinted by the pure physicality of the artist’s involvement. Sourcing material from his immediate environments, he creates works poised between the spectacular and the introspective.

Around his home in rural Karnataka, the artist watches the ease with which birds migrate to fit the dictates of the season. In ‘Nest’, he explores the possibility of return, of reversing the cycles of the year. The work consists of two photographs, the first shows an empty tree which as winter has come, has lost its leaves, and the second through the artist’s intervention, the leaves are collected form a large nest nestled in the branches of the tree.

In Zakkir Hussain’s work, the viewer can see a row of marching armies from across the panels of the triptych on view in this exhibition. The marching signifies the continuing processes of history, especially the rhythmic movement of the army. The armies he depicts are not conventional armies, but rather they are those that come from the hegemonic moral world, the ones that fight to keep up the vigilance against love, resistance, the right to speak or seek to normalize the citations of the everyday.

In that sense, discipline and the punishment are the main concern of the work. Normally, the sensibility of prevailing conditions focus and enlarge the disciplined aspects of the system, and negates the rights of the punished forms. The artist explains: “My attempt is to reverse this. I have given the full focus on the punished form in order to give a voice for to speak for the punished bodies which has been mutilated repeatedly in the cultural arena of the dominant.”