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| Edited By: Gargi Gupta,Ornella D'Souza |Source: DNA |Updated: Feb 26, 2018, 05:31 PM IST
There were far fewer selfie-seekers this time around – gallery owners and art fair regulars observed about the just-concluded India Art Fair (IAF). In the past, you couldn’t walk a few paces without running into someone posing against a piece of art. It was, after all, for many Delhiwallahs – trooping into Okhla’s NSIC exhibition grounds that has hosted the event for seven years – their first and only brush with contemporary art – installations, media works, video, performance, photography, sound art, et al – as Neha Kirpal, the fair’s founder and until last year its director, never tires of telling.
“IAF has, undoubtedly, done more to create an audience for radical art in India than anything else in the last 10 years,” says Sharan Apparao of Chennai’s Apparao Gallery. It has also, undoubtedly, helped to enhance the market for Indian contemporary art by attracting collectors (across India and outside) and major arts institutions. This year saw delegations from Tate, MoMA, Louvre Abu Dhabi, Singapore Art Museum and Fosun from China, to name a few.
“With international museums looking to set up Asian wings, India is the place to be for art,” says IAF’s new director Jagdip Jagpal. The fair thus works out as an advantageous proposition for everyone – the museums get to fly in, and in just a few days, see the broad range of art being produced in India and some from across Southeast Asia. Gallerists and artists too get a chance of being picked up to be showcased in the global centres of art.
This commercial aspect of the art fair has measured up to or even surpassed what used to be in early years, with several galleries such as Experimenter, Latitude 28, Chemould Prescott, and Chatterjee & Lal reported that they sold out most of their stocks in the first two days. What seems to have waned a bit is unfettered, naive enthusiasm of gawking crowds. “Even on Sunday, when earlier there wouldn’t be space to move, the stalls remained relatively empty. But those who are coming seem more genuinely interested,” says another Chennai-based gallerist.
Visitors definitely seemed better equipped to engage with the art, even the conceptual pieces. At Experimenter, the Kolkata gallery that showcases some of the most cutting-edge contemporaries, one passerby walked up to Prateek Raja, the director, to ask whether the Rathin Barman iron rebar sculpture had deliberately been propped aslant against the wall to make the most of the shadows it cast. Raja replied that he was absolutely right, before turning around to say that it was precisely such interactions that he enjoyed at IAF.
Moreover, it wasn’t just the larger, colourful works that attracted the crowds; people seemed ready and willing to engage with the more subtle ones requiring some concentration to appreciate. Kulu Ojha’s delicate, white on white paper-carving works at ZOCA gallery, for instance, had many reaching out for the magnifying glass to get a clearer look at the delicate artistry that had created a magical landscape of architectural forms. Similarly, Tara Kelton’s ‘Death by’ piece at GALLERYSKE, a series of around 95 inkjet print cards, had several viewers chuckling quietly at the saucy humour of her many imaginary scenarios of ‘death by’ sugar, freezing, swallowing, stampede, and hilariously, deletion!
"For a woman, underwear is not a necessity, but a sanitary napkin is.”
“Then what will she stick the sanitary napkin to?”
“Oh.”
Twenty-five-year old artist Mohna Singh was in dialogue with a man in his late 20s who had responded to her survey on what items women consider as essentials or luxury at The Irregulars Art Fair (TIRAF) — held at the same time as the India Art Fair. Reminiscent of student biennials at Kochi and Goa’s Serendipity Arts Festival, it showed the works of 45 indie artists, between 20-35 years, who are unafraid about voicing their rights, the problems plaguing their generation, and anti-establishment views. Singh’s survey pertained to her art installation — a mannequin drowned in a bathtub full of (resin) menstrual blood, with birth control pills, dildos, undergarments, as ‘rubber duckies’. Her stance against the high GST rates on sanitary napkins, “and bad tampons, zero male contraceptives, poor sexual education, unavailability of quality tasers, friends pop birth control pills and frequent beauty parlours to keep their men happy.”
“My friends told me I have the body of a woman, viewers told me I need to puff up, and I overheard two aged women saying, ‘such ugly bodies’, but I’m all about body positivity,” said Mohammed Chiba, a Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology alumnus, about his Body Studies, a quartet of semi-nude paintings of his lean body that titillated the female gaze. “Only a few body parts define what (biologically) makes a man or a woman. I felt, could I be a woman if I cropped out my head in the painting?” Then, Parth Gupta, alumnus of Raghu Rai Centre for Photography, displayed 100 black-and-white portraits of people whose bodies were fished out from the inter-state Bhakra Main Line Canal, a fact that authorities have tried to conceal. “70 per cent suicides, 13-15 are accidents and rest is murder,” reveals the 22-year-old. Lipika Bhargava’s knitted creations of genitals paid an ode to wet dreams. Tanya Maheshwari’s silhouettes, with gaping holes in unusual places, acknowledged her own conundrum to resist or conform to fashion trends. Barkha Gupta revisited a dilapidated structure through sketches in her futile attempt to reconstruct her now razed school building. Svojas Chari’s motion graphics metaphorised intense gym workouts as “our willingness to suffer”.
‘Anti-art fair,’ a concept predominant in Brooklyn, Berlin and New Zealand, always shadows a mainstream art fair avant garde style. And TIRAF shared this unmistakable Banksy vibe, evident in their About Us section on it’s Facebook page: “...we at The Irregulars Art Fair are challenging the traditional cultural landscape of the art market...”
“We had somebody walk in saying he didn’t feel like paying for this kind of art,” shrugs co-founder Anant Ahuja, 26-year-old creative director of Bridge Studios. “So we also had to educate people on what an anti-art fair is.”
Along with partner Tarini Sethi, a 28-year-old artist and founder of Studio Khikri, they set up the fair in three weeks flat that included setting up a one-page website and restoring the venue — a three-storey, empty leather goods factory owned by Sethi’s father at Khirkee Extension. This 1 ½ km radius of subaltern Delhi is also home to many African and Afghan immigrants. The locals, already acclimatised to existing art initiatives here — KHOJ International Artists’ Association, Gati Dance Forum, the Khirkhee Voice newspaper, annual Khirkhee Festival — it was easy for TIRAF to settle in smoothly. “The local children came in on guided tours and had so many questions for me about my work,” said an impressed Mumbai-based Jai Ranjit, concerning the live printmaking workshop he held here at his own expense. “But I nearly recovered it all through my product sales.”
“We wanted it to be inclusive to all medium and chose works from poetry, site specific installations to video and interactive art,” said Sethi, about the ultra personal artworks — Lipika Bhargava’s knitted creations of genitals paid an ode to wet dreams. Tanya Maheshwari’s silhouettes, with gaping holes in unusual places, acknowledged her own conundrum to resist or conform to fashion trends. Barkha Gupta revisited a dilapidated structure through sketches in her futile attempt to reconstruct her now razed school building. Svojas Chari’s motion graphics metaphorised intense gym workouts as “our willingness to suffer”. Self-professed introvert Anupam Kumar, hid behind his programmed version of the American Gothic House painting by Grant Wood to speak to his audience.
The vibe was, perhaps, too relaxed. A4 size sheets of the artist and artwork briefs were pasted onto the adjacent pale yellow walls. Bits of edifice giving way, malfunctioning parts of installations, poor lighting, untidiness, dearth of volunteers, cases of crass nudity... We caught Singh still touching up her installation on the last day. If IAF looked palatial, TIRAF felt like the servants quarters. “[But] how happy, the art makers and their viewers, looked with each other! Just early and mid-20 year olds doing what they know best,” said contemporary artist Jitish Kallat, remembering his student days when KHOJ was the only alternative venue. “The artists created infrastructure and ideas to exchange with their audience, an audience that is the same age as the artist. I distinctly felt old in there,” said Kallat sheepishly about his sharp grey suit.
Meanwhile, some very different art was being showcased on IGNCA grounds at the International Kala Mela, a first of its kind initiated by Lalit Kala Akademi administrator CS Krishna Setty.
Here, paintings were mainly by little-known artists from all over India – including the Northeast and Jharkhand, which aren’t known for modern art. Oil, acrylic, watercolour, gouache, pen-and-ink – the mediums were traditional, and so were the subject matters – abstract splashes of colour (a la Gaitonde, Ram Kumar, Bose Krishnamachari...), figurative pieces and images of deities (Ganesha and the Buddha predominate). Walking down the aisles – 325 stalls displayed works by 1,500 artists – it all seemed so old-fashioned, evoking a decorative aesthetic completely out of sync with what we celebrate as ‘contemporary’.
But Setty was making no high claims – the Kala Mela, he says, was meant to be a platform for budding artists who weren’t represented by a gallery and had few avenues, in a shrinking art market, to show or market their works.
Thus, more or less, everyone who applied was allowed to participate. But did the event succeed in providing budding artists a space that could take them to bigger things? Not really. Manavi Prabha, who’d put up five interesting paintings on the theme of man and nature, speaks of how footfalls were very low. M Raja, a Chennai-based senior artist who showcased acrylic and drypoint paintings of rural Tamil folk, says, “We got many enquiries, but few converted into sales until the last day. Many just waited till then to strike a bargain, as artists wouldn’t want to take their work back.”
