Demystifying ‘dolls’ - II

Bangalore based Gallery Sumukha presents a group exhibition featuring artists Abir Karmakar, Anthony Roche, Archana Hande, Ayisha Abraham, Barbara Ash, Chintan Upadhayay, Jasmeen Patheja, Jayamma, KT Shivaprasad, Princess Pea, Pushpamala N and Surekha.

Since traditionally girls were perceived to be easier to shape, it is their doll images that display the richest as well as the most disturbing complexity. As gender equations are democratizing now towards a certain androgyny, boys and boy-dolls begin to participate in these mutations. The possibility of affirming the child there has to deal with the possibility of it becoming used and abused by mature purposes, sensibilities and idiosyncrasies, roles, desires and expectations.

The twelve artists in this exhibition, as its curator Marta Jakimowicz notes, relish and play with as well as analyze and critique the phenomenon, supporting some of its beautiful aspects, revealing the density of others, subverting or parodying those, sometimes transforming them into weapons of defiance and protest.

Echoing the layers within the subject, they mediate wonder, tenderness and affirmation, gravity, light humor and sarcasm, exuberance and revulsion, pleasure and sadness, ironic, at times conceptual, retorts and descriptive or narrative suggestiveness, natural and put-on behavior. Reference to the actual and the immediate comes with the recourse to elements of realistic rendering, photography, film and quotations from stylized popular imagery.

The direct and unadorned may bring unassuming, warm elements but also coarse, raw ones. Allusions to classical, folk and contemporary iconography and objects may anchor in graceful qualities, in twisted, shocking ones too. A dose of endearing or disquieting kitsch and commercial cliché surfaces along with the phantasmagoria, contradictions, hypocrisies and conflicts inherent to it.

Since many of the participants in slightly or drastically different ways deal with a number of manifestations and issues associated with the theme, their works together evoke the connectedness and the disjoint among its baffling and lucid traits, its richness and poverty, potentiality and limitations that remain evident as well as suppressed in the real world, ever fluctuating between the stability of ingrained paradigms and their simultaneous transformation towards things intuited but unpredictable.

(Information courtesy: Gallery Sumukha)