The topical exhibition "Re:public" (Gallery Five Forty Five, January 13 to 26) curated by LinaVincent Smith marks and confronts associated issues.
It triggers a focus on the individual as part of society needing to honestly and responsibly analyse, question and affirm one's nature, ethics and position versus manifestations of national ideals, political power equations and actual hierarchies, personal aspirations too seen through the prism of popular culture and art.
One does appreciate the choice, its complementary contributions and cathartic potential, but it was assembled somewhat quickly, although the limitations of the space were largely unavoidable.
Even if the curator had to choose mainly from familiar works of the five participating artists from the City, more attention should have been given to the display, not only to set off mutual interactions but especially to afford respect to the pieces of quality.
Otherwise, with sufficient patience, the visitor can empathise with the balance of view angles and variety of perspectives with their different emotional and conceptual tonalities. Critical sarcasm expressed in a fairly literal way is found at one extreme.
In fact, it introduces the exhibition in the shape of a life-size politician statue by Shivanand Basawanthappa, the kitschy gloss of the profuse decorations-metaphors on the naturalistic figure underscoring the prevalence of well-practiced and socially accepted oily hypocrisy.
By comparison, the many drawings of cocks and bulls epitomising humans relishing their follies may be loud towards an easy effect.
His satirical companion, Ravikumar Kashi comes up with an understated and distanced yet eventually biting indictment of the diverse self-serving distortions of Gandhi's idealism in an installation with washing lines of his caps.
A counterbalancing couple of painters bring in a more exuberant blend of affirmation and irony in their portrayals of the young generation.
Pradeep D M , through dense patterns and graceful stylistic allusions to folklore, mirrors the hybrid condition between traditional simplicity and newly enthusiastic urban consumerism.
Anthony Roche adds here mischievous but loving visual elements of corporate, comic and art-historical globalisation.
A very different gesture of regard, empathy for and identification with the ethos, feelings and creativity of the people at the base of society comes from Estee Oarsed who for his lithographic prints collaborated on an equal footing with small time film poster artists, the apparent naivety of their idiom containing authenticity and specific sophistication.
Collaborative democracy
The need for and phenomenon of collaboration between artists and non-artists is a comparatively new, nonetheless already quite acknowledged, aspect of art-making internationally, in particular in Europe, based not only on respect for and inspiration from life on all planes but primarily on discovering and offering equal footing of non-professional creativity.
It probably has much to do with the young idealism behind the pluralistic acceptance of today's progressive or just empathetic, locally and globally oriented aspirations as well as with the humbling yet radicalising familiarity with the long-lasting recession.
Thus, this democratic premise and method, in stead of doing something for the deprived and marginalised from a position of superior knowledge, aim at achievement by working together in constant mutual adjustment and discussion, the final product being as important, if not less important, than the actual experience during the collaborative process.
This existential experience outside of the gallery, however, restricts the possibility of its full revelation to the external viewer. Here 'We were trying to make sense…', the exhibition curated by Magda Fabianczyk (1 Shanthiroad Studio/Gallery, January 5 to 15), was a significant introduction to and presentation of such collaborative efforts, significant especially considering the Indian tendency to take unacknowledged help from others, while true collaborative channels remain sporadic, Estee Oarsed probing parallels between the behaviour of art and life.
Although the display included some finished works, its necessarily documentary character was rightly directed at enabling the visitor to intuit, even study the overall subject and its specific instances.
The collected material, besides completed videos, included information about the way of making the works and the background of the people behind them, interviews with them sometimes carrying contrary ideas and expectations and was analytically gathered in a publication written by Fabianczyk with Sophie Hoyle.
Its content does not shy of probing doubts and inherent limitations or contradictions indicating that such interactive engagements are targets and active approximations, not fixed objects of value.
The independent participants fro- m the UK, Poland, Germany, Pakistan and India conjure a gamut of topical sources and formal options from folk music and theatre, to street posters, to directly working with homeless migrants and underprivileged locals, to threading email-sent, intimate videos or postal image contributions to provoking evocative situations from public concerts.