‘Your Name Is Different There’

A thematic group show, entitled ‘Your Name is Different There,’ is on view at Mumbai‘s Volte Gallery.

It comprises thought provoking works by Ranbir Kaleka, Sonia Khurana, Sheba Chhachhi, and CAMP (a group of artists namely, Sanjay Bangar, Ashok Sukumaran and Shaina Anand) that revolve around the hazy identity of the displaced; and in particular, of those who precariously stand at its threshold.

Elaborating on the concept, a curatorial note by Nancy Adajania states: “In this exhibition I propose to explore, with four artists, a pervasive form of survivor testimony that recurs across societies and historical situations in our global present: an epoch characterized by genocide, displacement, and the alienation of individuals from their lives and loci.

Central to this curatorial inquiry is the figure of the displaced, the dislocated or the disoriented person: one who is obliged to inhabit a threshold state or liminal condition, not fully able to leave a lost history behind, nor yet equipped to embrace the uncertain future that lies ahead.

How such figures negotiate this condition, and how witness may be borne to their experience, are questions addressed by the participating artists through a constellation of photographs and video installations. Accordingly, the show -- its title is drawn from Jeet Thayil’s poem, ‘After’ -- will be developed around five key figures: the activist, the bairagi or renunciate, the marginal (flaneur or tramp), the witness to violence and upheaval, and the neighbor.

These figures are not bearers of static identities into which they have been socially conscripted. They are vectors operating in the meso-realm between stricture and choice, freedom and unfreedom, the hinged and the unhinged; at the intersection where practical politics meets art, each struggling to make or unmake the other.

They are sometimes juxtaposed against one another, at other times they blur and grow into each other: a renunciate stages a protest, albeit of a different kind from an activist; a vagabond can also be a flaneur; a tramp in performance could come face-to-face with a real beggar; a victim is often in the danger of becoming an aggressor. Significantly, various historical narratives are in flux around these works and around the oeuvres of these artists: sanyasa, Partition, citizenship, Shoah and Nakba.