Significant international shows of Indian art

In a new group show, several prominent Indian artists show us the way in which water flows through all of us and how it has historically reflected one's soul. At a major group show at Walsh Gallery, Chicago, they explore the way art and water Intersect. Vivan Sundaram, Reena Kallat, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, and Sheba Chhachhi alongside Song Dong, Miao Xiaochun and Wang Wei from China showcase photography, installation and video based works.

In Reena Kallat's series of photographs depicts women knitting letters that form the line ‘Our Bodies are Molded Rivers’ by German poet Novalis. What interests her is the allusion of the body as a channel since so much of the human body is made of water. Vivan Sundaram’s project involves Delhi trash pickers. He has fastened together 8,000 plastic bottles gathered by them to form a raft to be floated down the river, carrying several passengers.

The project culminates with its dismantling for the water bottles to be recycled. A photo montage by Gulam Mohammed Sheikh represents the pictorial traditions of both the East and West, whereas Sheba Chhachhi's surrealistic video probes the sediment of memory and time, encouraging us to read the subterranean histories and mythologies of water below the urban jungle.

Simultaneously, New York based e-flux presents an installation by Raqs Media Collective that combines historical photographs (from the Alkazi Collection, New Delhi and the Galton Collection at University College, London). It incorporates video, animation, and sound. ‘The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet’ builds sequential scenarios that move across time and space, while considering collectivity, anonymity and the question of identity through history, fantasy and speculation. The work was commissioned and exhibited at the Art Now: Lightbox by Tate Britain, last year.

Open-ended and anti-documentary, it’s presented within a setting suggestive of a lecture hall; there’s the anticipation of discourse: microphones and chairs are seen on raised platforms but speakers are absent. The setting evokes the lecture-performance format often used by the artists, but they, their bodies themselves, have somehow vanished. Their voices are left behind, along with entire cabinets of curiosities.