Highlights of a major Indian art show at Helsinki Art Museum

A group exhibition Helsinki City Art Museum in Finland presents a wide range of works by several talented artists from India. In this series, we peep into the career graph and oeuvre of some of the participants:

New Delhi based Anay Mann even worked as a photographic model for a brief period. Early in his career, he photographed upper and middle-class urban youths, who have been able to adopt alternative lifestyles to complement their more traditional ones with the economic boom, they. His series ‘Equal Dreams – Portraits of Indians’ depicts people from across India of all castes and social classes. The subjects of the photographs are always seated in the same chair. In India, a chair symbolizes power. In his pictures, it emphasizes the equality between individuals.

In his ‘Trash’ series Vivan Sundaram has photographed sorted heaps of waste on his studio floor. The configurations of rubbish resemble urban views or landscapes. As the Indian middle class is growing, so is consumption and the amount of waste. The fate of the poor is to collect, sort and recycle waste around the clock, he suggests.

The sculptures of Valay Shende bear a resemblance to luxury goods, yet their topic is the everyday worries of people in an urbanising India. The shakers on the gaudy table contain soil and ashes. Referring to the suicide of a hapless farmer, the work is a comment on the growing misery in rural areas. Tens of thousands of debt-trapped farmers have been driven to suicide in India in recent years.

Riyas Komu’s practice contains a strong political message. Terror, war, chauvinism and exploitation are all central themes in his work. The portrait series 'Designated March by a Petro – Angel (or Desert March)' is based on 'The Circle', a film by Iran's Jafar Panahi, which describes the suffering of women in third-world countries.

His passion for the game of football is reflected in the series ‘Occupation Stories’, a picture of the Iraqi soccer player Younis Mahmoud and a map of the United States are superimposed. When Iraq won the Asian Cup in 2007, Mahmoud, the captain of the national team, said in the media that he wanted U.S. troops to leave Iraq.

(Information courtesy: Helsinki City Art Museum)