Longing for Tomorrow’, at Nature Morte, Berlin

With their bewildering body of works, the artist duo of Thukral & Tagra explores the bizarre blend of sentimentality and nostalgia suffused with clichéd futurisms epitomized by the fast-growing Indian middle class, especially in the expanding new cities like Gurgaon, an extension of New Delhi where the two currently live and work.

Having emerged as a hub of manufacturing and IT, it’s also now recognized as a sprawling and segmented residential community largely characterized by faux-classical mansions, mega-malls dotted with globalized food courts, dirt roads leading to steel and glass behemoths, and skyscraper or apartment blocks outwardly decked out like colonial bungalows, so to say.

The artists have concocted frenetic mix of high and low styles in sculptures and paintings in an apt response to this mesmerizing and perplexing urban reality that now typifies the ‘new India’. Their new solo, entitled ‘Longing for Tomorrow’, at Berlin-based Nature Morte includes works produced by them at the historic Meissen porcelain factory near Dresden. Taking a cue from the Meissen archives’ classical vases, the two have piled them up into comical towers, to paint them with their trademark tantalizing imagery in captivating candy colors.

The porcelain centerpieces, framed by fascinating furniture pedestals and wall-mounted backdrops, contrast the rarified material with rather down-market plastics as well as laminates. The end result is in the form of seductive constructions that propel the work of Carlo Bugatti, 19th century Italian designer, right into the 21st century, with some sly references to High Modernism as it was tinkered with, in Post-Independence India.

The two depicted desires, fantasies, hopes and dreams of The Great Indian Middle Class in their earlier show at Nature Morte, Gurgaon, revolving around an installation steeped in saccharine sweetness and morbid longing. The duo painted pictures of the garishly inappropriate mini-mansions that pop up like weeds all around them in this precocious satellite city of New Delhi, wallowing in the contradictions, lathering on the Kitsch with a sardonic wink that acknowledged the ancestry of European Surrealism in the construction of the contemporary Indian identity, the vampiric relationship between fashion and prestige, defining our domiciles.