A monumental work that puts together past and present, history and recent events

A new solo by senior artist Gulammohammed Sheikh takes place at Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi. It features a monumental piece by him, ‘CITY: Memory, Dreams, Desire, Statues & Ghosts: Return of Hiuen Tsang’, which was shown as part of ‘Place.Time.Play: India-China Contemporary Art Exhibition’. Specially created for the the West Heavens Project in Shanghai last year, it around the 7th century famous Chinese-Buddhist monk, Hiuen Tsangor Xuanzang of Tang Dynasty.

Hiuen traveled to India (known as West Heavens then in his country) to bring home a set scriptures, which were to serve as the foundation of the Chinese schools of Buddhism. If in ‘Kaavad’, he was inspired by a Mappamundi ‘s (medieval European maps of the world) cartographic format, his landscape here blends the bare drawings of old archeological site maps and the visuality of a satellite image like Google maps.

The work looks to explore the various possibilities of inhabiting one space even while creating other spaces like memories, dreams, desires etc. Envisioned as Hiuen Tsang’s return to the City (in perhaps Gujarat) wherein the city is itself split into two halves–the floor panels acting as an archaeological site and the standing panels map as the living city affected by recent violence, with apparent reference to both history and memory.

Dr. Kavita Singh mentions, “This exhibit is a culmination: bringing to their fullest amplitude many of his themes, motifs and obsessions, which have haunted Gulammohammed Sheikh’s work for the past three decades… That the works presented mark a particular high-point in his oeuvre, however, is first apparent in the monumental scale of many of those on view. Gradually, they present themselves, on a sustained viewing to be also at the point at which the densities of meaning, the weight of elegiac beauty, and the intensity of affect find their most condensed and highly intense expression.”

The exhibition also includes a selection of his gouaches, papier-mache works and oil canvases , alongside other 'Kaavad' shrines plus hand-painted and digital books.