This major exhibition features his seminal work ‘Kaavad: Home’ that premiered at ‘Chalo India: A New Era of Indian Art’, an exhibition at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum in 2008. A mobile wooden shrine or a kaavad is basically a traditional object that contains painted narratives used by of Rajasthan’s Kaavadiya Bhats (travelling performers) as a prop for their art of storytelling.
As they narrate their stories, they would open up the kaavad, and reveal a new layer, to build a sense of curiosity and anticipation to the sight of the inner core after that long-delayed moment. To Gulammohammed Sheikh, this portable and popular format not only presented the possibility of greater visibility but also could rest within it narratives to combine the same in different permutations and combinations just by the folding/unfolding act of its doors.
Each curious combination maps a whole new journey, a different narrative: his kaavad serves as a medium through which our social, cultural, political belief systems- new and he old, of the past and present - could be examined. The diverse archive of references incorporates multitude of elements like contemporary citations of violence, migration, displacement, as well as fabled journeys, quotations by Kabir and autobiographical accounts.
To this thinking and sensitive artist, this is also a quiet personal space, the world as Home that initiates a conversation between personal histories and characters from both real life and art. Each facet of the kaavad narrates a different tale, albeit all deftly interwoven. Being large in scale and stark in effect, they tend to immerse the viewer in their very physicality, blurring the gap between real and imaginary, art and life.
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