India unbranded at Frankfurt

Ravi Agarwal

FRANKFURT: Just as I was to take off, while in Europe, for Frankfurt, to see a photography show which included my work as well, a friend from Germany called me excitedly.

“India is everywhere!” It was the Frankfurt Book Fair and India, the Guest of Honour. I expected the usual ‘films division’ type of bureaucratic stereotyping, unimaginatively hyped in ‘tricolour and nationhood.’ However, I was pleasantly surprised, in the couple of days that I was there. Unfortunately, our media only reported our (deserving) doyens like Ghosh and Seth, eclipsing the bursting creative depth and intellectual verve which this society holds in its belly. Maybe a crisis of confidence still confronts us, as we seem circumspect to uphold that not already ‘acknowledged by the ‘west.’

India was everywhere! More than 10 exhibitions of contemporary art, photography, manuscripts, posters etc. are being held along locations on and around the beautiful river Main, the site for this peaceful industrial city. I could only see some, but they revealed a rarer glimpse of a more contemporary India, beyond the images created by the marketing machines of Bollywood, commerce and tourism. There were also scores of better known events. Music recitals, films, book readings, the presence of over 40 Indian language writers, experimental theatre by Maya Rao and Habib Tanvir, and a major show in Munich by Vivan Sundaram on his Amrita Shergill series.

However it is the ‘hidden’ other side I refer to. The Raqs Media Collective, an internationally known name in art (though lesser known at home) showed a strong conceptual work called the ‘KD Vyas Correspondence Vol 1,’ dealing with hypertextuality and global connectivity, all provocatively referenced to the ancient chronicle of the Mahabharata, at the Museum fur Kommunikattion. At the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Gigi Scaria, a video artist from Delhi, showed his work on wastepickers along with works from Open Circle and others. The edgy videos, collaboratively made with artists, planners, theoreticians and curators, revealed the social tensions of our globalising cities. Close by, at the Goethe Institute (known in India as the Max Muller Bhawan), Dilip Prakash displayed his extensive auto-biographical photographs on ‘Anglo- Indians.’

What really impressed me was an exhibition of manuscripts at the Museum fur Angewandte, ‘The Word is Sacred, Sacred is the Word.’ One piece from 2nd century BC, but most from 9th century AD to current times, spanned our ongoing engagement with the written word and ideas.

These manuscripts often worshipped in place of idols and deities (like the holy Guru Granth Sahib), un-layered another dimension of a traditional society, not only based on voodoo like practices, but premised in what constitutes modernity — knowledge. I must thank Parthiv Shah, who helped design the show, for sneaking me in before the show had even opened!

At the Museum der Welkulturen, Barbel Hogner, a German ethnologist showed her photographs on Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, one of the few modern cities (like Brasilia) built from scratch in recent times. Though visually disappointing, the show illustrated both a merging and dissonance amidst the European architecture by Indian lifestyles. Finally, the place where I was showing, the Fotografie Forum International, had 9 photographers from India, exhibiting diverse approaches to self — portraiture, figuratively speaking. Departing from traditional photo journalistic or social documentary essays, the works told personal stories in a contemporary genre and reflected new engagements with this elusive, powerful medium. My saying more about this show, “Watching me, Watching India, New Photography from India, curated by Gayatri Sinha and Celina Lunsford, will obviously be out of order!

Looking back, this brief interlude, even with its critiques of ‘babudom,’ gave a glimpse of a more complex Indian, conscious of her multiplicities. I would personally prefer to be thought of as a person of multiple contradictions rather than as an easy ‘brand,’ Made in India, which we seem to be anxious to project to the world.