Tracking the artistic journey of Desire Machine Collective

From the bewildering Brahmaputra banks, an Indian artist duo has made it to the Venice Biennale. We are referring to Desire Machine Collective.

For artists who claim to stay away from the mainstream gallery and exhibition circuit and are seemingly not so much interested in the ‘mass’ production of popular art ‘objects’ - not in the sense most understand them, at least - the artist group’s selection for the prestigious biennale is significant. Their works are going to be on display at the first ever official India Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale.

It’s almost seven years that they have pursued their experimental, avant garde practices in the remote areas of Guwahati, far off the maddening rush of Mumbai or New Delhi. And it is exactly this that turned the gaze of renowned curator-art scholar Ranjit Hoskote. He is commissioner of the official Pavilion.

While scouting for artists ‘from a host of unusual locations, backgrounds, economies and histories of art production’, who would jell with the broader theme of cultural citizenship, of ‘what really it means to be an Indian?’, he came across Desire Machine Collective. Their works are woven around the concept that he has kept in mind while curating the works of art for the official pavilion.

The well-known critic has been quoted as saying, regarding his choice of artists’ duo: “Desire Machine Collective pursues a sophisticated, vital art practice. They also share strong regional commitments, and yet they have managed to take their body of work out there to the world. They perfectly embody what I convey, that you don’t exactly need to be metropolitan (in approach or else) to be cosmopolitan. Their artwork is political at its core, highlighting economies that have been silently superseded and also voices that have been muted. But the same is equally nuanced,” he quips.

Artists explore the lexicon of palimpsest

‘Palimpsest’, a show at New York based Aicon Gallery, features works by artists Jayashree Chakravarty, Pooja Iranna, Vidya Kamat, Riyas Komu, Asma Mundrawal, Puja Puri, Talha Rathore, Nausheen Saeed and Avishek Sen.

A press release elaborates: “Drawing on the work of contemporary South Asian artists, this exhibition is arranged as a series of visual and narrative palimpsests depicting real or imagined traces of the past. Ideas of surface and depth, of secondary quotations and lost sources – of fleeting and hidden references, and of layering from a lost image are at the heart of this group exhibition.

A palimpsest is traditionally defined as an overwritten page – that is, it refers to the remnants of lost text as seen on re-used surfaces in books. As a term, literary and cultural theorists often use it to interpret narratives and imagery with an illusory textual presence. Post-colonialists often applied palimpsests as a concept to sort through layers of cultural experience, thus chronicling the ineradicable traces of history while acknowledging that, over time, traces shall remain in memory – or ultimately, be forgotten.

The concept of a palimpsest is thus an invaluable tool to be used in extracting pre-colonial culture from colonialist accounts and sources, while also helping to define shifting landscapes in terms of social or geographical compositions. The group show explores the lexicon of this concept through the work of a group of eight contemporary South Asian artists working in a variety of mediums. Palimpsest points to its own exploration via the cyclical actions of making, remaking, and erasing, all of which work to reveal trace elements retained either in memory or physical form.

For instance, capturing the Capturing the conflicting interdependent forces of the palimpsest, are works such as Asma Mundrawal’s ‘Is You or Is You Ain’t?’, depicting an idealized, perhaps unattainable, scene of contemporary middle-class Pakistani family life in the form of a children’s pop-up book that can be collapsed into nothingness at any moment. Similarly, Jayashree Chakravarty’s intricately layered and reworked paintings address the concept of the palimpsest by drawing from both figurative and abstract motifs to present multiple narratives both building upon and at odds with one another.

Mithu Sen at Espace Louis Vuitton gallery, Taipei

At Taipei’s Espace Louis Vuitton gallery, a show by Mithu Sen has been receiving immense critical acclaim since it was launched earlier this month. She has showcased some really large works and prints on the walls, which apparently denote a ‘mental journey through one’s life’. The works carry a feel of joie de vivre akin to one brought by chirping birds on a colorful foliage.

There are fleeting strokes of picturesque beauty to keep you engrossed - pebbled paths and mountain terrain – alongside uprooted flowering bushes crammed in shopping carts and passing animals on wheels that share space with candle stands plus an avant-garde LV suitcase on a cart.

The exhibit takes place almost a year after one of her most acclaimed series of works ‘Black Candy’ was hosted at Chemould Prescott, Mumbai. Incidentally, the artist was invited last year for the Taipei exhibition by the Vice-president (cultural development) Louis Vuitton, Vita Wong and the Mori Art Museum director, Fumio Nanjo. Their brief was very simple - to create a body of work in tandem with what the world-famous luxury brand stands for...

Mulling over the theme and the subject matter in her Faridabad studio, Mithu Sen opted to replace her frequently used and familiar mediums like blood, teeth tress etc with watercolor on customized Japanese paper. It was sourced from a factory located near Kyoto. She based her work on memories of her childhood across India.

The first set of works that was presented to Nanjo earlier this year was termed as a touch ‘too depressing’. The artist has been quoted as saying: “We spoke after the Tsunami and the curator suggested how there was need for optimism, following darkness and so many deaths.” The artist spent another two weeks to reshape the current body of work as it is now.

A fly-on-the-wall account of the the contemporary art market's subcultures

An experienced art writer, historian and sociologist based in London, Sarah Thornton is known to contribute to prestigious online and offline publications about the art market mechanics, artists’ working lives and human behavior in cultural context.

Her ‘Seven Days in the Art World’ throws light on the hierarchies that structure this world of money and power based on several juicy quotes from key 'players' in the market, alluding to power play and status anxiety. A pertinent question posed by Thornton is: “How is a consensus on any artwork or artist ever reached? According to her, the super-rich acquire works for social reasons as she goes on to describe the excesses of modern art world with panache.

With her new sizzling and searing account of the art world, she ventures into a statusphere, dealing with the market players’, and focusing on seven different days – spread over a span of three years & five countries. Describing the settings for the plot, an introductory essay to the book describes it as a fly-on-the-wall account of the strange and smart subcultures that make, curate, trade, collect, hype, and govern contemporary art.”

The dramatic account considers why art has become a sought after commodity through a unique time format and chain of events. Day one at an auction in New York is followed by a peculiar student seminar in California; next, a fair in Basel; Turner Prize judging process at the Tate; and then with a magazine in Manhattan. A studio visit in Toyama and the Venice Biennale’s launch marks the last couple of days of her gripping sojourn that provide a peep into the subtle power dynamics, which animates all the interconnected milieus.

‘Seven Days in the Art World’ (Paperback; 287 pages) builds a series of non-fiction narratives, which astutely reveal the inner functioning of the institutions contributing to an individual artist’s place in broader art history. The author reveals the fast chaining dynamics of creativity, modern taste, money, new found status, and the search for meaning. Woven in a beautifully paced and user friendly narrative, she constructs and investigates the drama of an international auction scene, the behind-the-scenes activities in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite crowd at the art fair, the art fraternity’s eccentricities, the workings behind a major art award, moments in an art-school seminar, and last but not the least, the Venice Biennale’s wonderland.

Exploring cultural translation and dislocation through common objects

Hauser & Wirth New York presents ‘A glass of water,’ its first exhibition devoted to internationally admired artist Subodh Gupta. Buttons and cans, steel cups of water, simple bread dough, and the forks and smears of sauce left upon plates after a meal has been consumed, all serve as elements in the artist’s complex choreography of meaning and oppositional values.

In the world of Subodh Gupta, the most quotidian objects and experiences lie in perfect equipoise between artistic, cultural, and spiritual abundance and emptiness, the twin companions of all who reside in the era of globalization and diaspora.

Born in 1964 in Khagaul, the Indian countryside in Bihar state, the artist is now based in New Delhi. Before his education as a visual artist, Gupta, who is passionate about film, was a street theatre actor. The artist’s change of residence from his native village to a major urban center is in a way an allegory of today’s India.

The growing middle class that migrated from villages to large cities is eagerly clearing the path for change and the dominance of global capitalist culture. Gupta is interested in what inevitably disappears in the process of such change.

Subodh Gupta has long explored the effects of cultural translation and dislocation through his work, most famously using Indian kitchen utensils – particularly his nation’s ubiquitous metal tiffins and thali pans – to demonstrate art’s ability to transcend cultural and economic boundaries.

The mass-produced objects that have played such a prominent role in his art offer an ambiguous symbolism: While they are seen by those in the West as exotic and representative of Indian culture, to those in India they are common items that are used daily in almost every household, from the poorest to the wealthiest. The artist harnesses these varying associations and, in the process, makes his materials subjects in their own right.

Subodh Gupta focuses on instruments of measurement for his new series

A significant show at Hauser & Wirth (New York) incorporates recent works by Subodh Gupta, who now turns his attention to instruments of measurement - in particular, those related to the food & drink that all humans measure through either daily consumption or desperately thwarted hunger – as metaphors in a chimerical visual poem about global appetite.

His ideas have taken shape in a variety of different media, from film and video, to steel, bronze, marble, and paint, which he employs for both their aesthetic properties and as conceptual signifiers carrying a wealth of connotations. The world-renowned contemporary Indian artist explores the opposing tensions of desire and control.

A tailor’s measuring tape, shirt buttons and a sieve are blown up into large-scale steel sculptures, establishing the rules of a game in which distortion and tricks of medium ambush viewers’ expectations of value. Comprising a group of sculptures, optically incandescent paintings, and two slyly illusionist installations, the new work on view further extends Gupta’s ongoing investigation into the sustaining and even transformational power of everyday objects and activities.

In the trompe l’oeil installation work ‘Atta,’ a simple, found wooden table bears a mound of dough that appears to have been measured out and lovingly prepared, but abandoned in the midst of kneading. Daily bread is the staff of life, but Gupta’s dough is inedible: sprinkled and surrounded by real flour, it is a painstakingly painted bronze simulacrum.

The complement to ‘Atta’ is an installation work from which the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth New York takes its name. ‘A glass of water’ presents another wooden table topped only with a single metal drinking cup. Inside this cup but just barely contained by it, is fresh water that mysteriously remains in a constant and unyielding state of brimming.

Filled beyond capacity and threatening forever to spill at the slightest vibration, Gupta’s simple but precarious offering serves up a rich metaphor for the almost unbearable tension between luxury and depletion, accumulation and deprivation, acquisition and exhaustion that are the daily diet of exploding international culture.

‘A glass of water’ will remain on view until June 18.

(Information courtesy: Hauser & Wirth, New York)

Defining trends that mark the Turner Prize shortlist

The two painters, Karla Black and George Shaw, are joined by video artist Hilary Lloyd and sculptor Martin Boyce on the 2011 prize shortlist. According to one of the prize jurors, Katrina Brown, the list was necessarily not representative of ‘one particular school, or cluster, or any movement as every medium is there in the mix. As the juror proclaims, it has a touch of maturity and diversity about it.

Quite in contrast to the shortlists of the 1990s that were largely dominated young British artist, the trend seems to have changed a bit. This was when the epicenter of British artistic life seemed to be lying the few square miles just around Shoreditch. Now the list is decidedly non-metropolitan. As is evident, only one of the four artists is based in London, namely – the Newcastle Polytechnic-trained Hilary Lloyd.

George Shaw, who completed his art education in Sheffield, now lives and works in Devon. On the other hand, Kara Black and Martin Boyce are from Glasgow – the city from where the last two winners of the Turner Prize, painter Richard Wright and sculptor Susan Philipsz emerged. The director of Tate Britain and also chair of the Turner jury, Penelope Curtis states the Glaswegian focus was a testimony to the strength and focus of the training made available in the 1990s at Glasgow School of Art.

Katrina Brown defines it as a clear sign of the maturity of the UK art scene, which is not any more concentrated in the capital city alone. Indeed, the whole prize dynamics will in a way turn its back on the prime art center this year. As if in keeping with the trend the annual Turner prize exhibit, will be held at the Baltic gallery located in Gateshead. (The show opens on 21 October.) In fact, it’s the first time ever in the prestigious show's more than 25-year old history that it has been hosted outside a Tate gallery and just the second occasion it has been carried outside the British capital.