Document and homage
M Shanthamani's work has always been empathic to the physicality of the environment and the human condition, its rawness revealing both vulnerability or dying and resilience or rebirth.
Her search along with some persistent motifs, like natural materials, charred bones and hand casts, peaked in the recent exhibition "Reflections" whose multimedia images presented the artist's three-month long journey on the Ganga (Cinnamon, June 8 to 15).
The venture of "witnessing" the powerful flow which sustains much of the country geographically along with its culture and psyche, combined learning about and documenting the river and the daily life around it with a personal response, where a frank but warm contact with people alternated with often performative art pieces, those appearing simultaneously as gestures of ritual offering.
Throughout, one recognised the desire to merge with the element considered to reveal the sacredness of the profane. One admired the overwhelmingly ambitious and sincere project especially that its display emphasised the diverse, sometimes blending strands of the process and progression.
As valid as the approach was, its actual realisation, however, oscillated between the evocatively spectacular and the merely descriptive or informative. The whole show led to its core and culmination in the shape of an immense human spine on the floor that arched with a painful fluidity, indeed the "Back-Bone" of India.
Although the small charcoal modules may have been to regular and surface-bound, from afar the impact was forceful, disturbing and deeply touching. The visitor felt its riverine stir first facing it foreshortened and moving along its course to find a visually and feeling-wise complementary video where the changing currents of the river surface combined in a mutual response with masses of flower garlands indeed in some "Wind-Unwind."
The pervasiveness of grandeur and intimacy continued over a reverse proportion in the stream of "Hand-Cast" comprising of six videos on minute, boxed monitors holding cameo encounters with some extraordinarily ordinary people whose livelihood depends on the changing condition of the river accompanied by their three-dimensional hand casts in cotton rag pulp and Ganga sand. Here too, certain aspects of the work had to be indicated verbally for clarity, but the roughly sensitive proximity of the entire installation exerted its own effect very well.
The ration between self-expressiveness and the need to explain increased in the two series of larger photographic prints taken during Shanthamani's live projects, in one of which she offered herself to the Ganga as "Body Float", a triple corporeal cast in flowers, camphor and ash to gradually disintegrate and become one with the water, while in the other she inflamed the camphor on vast footprints to make them "Burning Feet" on the river marking a miraculous sort of human presence in it as well as its destructive impact.
In both cases one could attune oneself to the more blended, decaying stages rather than the slightly obvious, lucid ones. If the detailed explanations in writing that recurred all along were quite unnecessary, since the works as such exuded their basic content, the couple of photographic cycles, strangely called installations, turned veritably obvious in their documentary-didactic character.
Instead of illustrating the story about "Bricks" being manufactured by desperate farmers who now make the land infertile or coming close to religiosity while capturing the stances of people during the "Argya" ritual, the artist should have perhaps based on the broader expressiveness of such wonderful shots as one with labourers kneading soil as though its was a body or a number of takes with worshippers' backs against the darkly luminous, rippling water.
Hebbar remembered
"A Tribute to K K Hebbar", the exhibition (CKP, June 25 to 27) which was part of the larger Hebbar festival organised by Art Mantram and The K K Hebbar Art Foundation, besides a delectable, as always, gamut of his drawings, housed a fair number of works, almost all of them paintings, that together were set out to indeed pay homage to the much loved predecessor whose birth centenary happens this year.
However well-meant and adequate in stressing the kind of aesthetic and thematic fields associated with Hebbar's modernist-indigenist-abstract sources, the selection looked at times more old-fashioned than his own oeuvre. The senior artists, maybe in accordance with this profile, represented to a significant degree officially acceptable names.
Starting rightly with Hebbar's daughter Rekha Rao's child portrait and an abstraction, the show ranged from S G Vasudev's new take on the tree of life to the virtually same styles of Khande Rao, Vijay Sindhur, M B Patil or Srikant Shetty, the only relief being Chandranath Acharya's consummate marriage of realism and cartooning.
M Shanthamani's work has always been empathic to the physicality of the environment and the human condition, its rawness revealing both vulnerability or dying and resilience or rebirth.
Her search along with some persistent motifs, like natural materials, charred bones and hand casts, peaked in the recent exhibition "Reflections" whose multimedia images presented the artist's three-month long journey on the Ganga (Cinnamon, June 8 to 15).
The venture of "witnessing" the powerful flow which sustains much of the country geographically along with its culture and psyche, combined learning about and documenting the river and the daily life around it with a personal response, where a frank but warm contact with people alternated with often performative art pieces, those appearing simultaneously as gestures of ritual offering.
Throughout, one recognised the desire to merge with the element considered to reveal the sacredness of the profane. One admired the overwhelmingly ambitious and sincere project especially that its display emphasised the diverse, sometimes blending strands of the process and progression.
As valid as the approach was, its actual realisation, however, oscillated between the evocatively spectacular and the merely descriptive or informative. The whole show led to its core and culmination in the shape of an immense human spine on the floor that arched with a painful fluidity, indeed the "Back-Bone" of India.
Although the small charcoal modules may have been to regular and surface-bound, from afar the impact was forceful, disturbing and deeply touching. The visitor felt its riverine stir first facing it foreshortened and moving along its course to find a visually and feeling-wise complementary video where the changing currents of the river surface combined in a mutual response with masses of flower garlands indeed in some "Wind-Unwind."
The pervasiveness of grandeur and intimacy continued over a reverse proportion in the stream of "Hand-Cast" comprising of six videos on minute, boxed monitors holding cameo encounters with some extraordinarily ordinary people whose livelihood depends on the changing condition of the river accompanied by their three-dimensional hand casts in cotton rag pulp and Ganga sand. Here too, certain aspects of the work had to be indicated verbally for clarity, but the roughly sensitive proximity of the entire installation exerted its own effect very well.
The ration between self-expressiveness and the need to explain increased in the two series of larger photographic prints taken during Shanthamani's live projects, in one of which she offered herself to the Ganga as "Body Float", a triple corporeal cast in flowers, camphor and ash to gradually disintegrate and become one with the water, while in the other she inflamed the camphor on vast footprints to make them "Burning Feet" on the river marking a miraculous sort of human presence in it as well as its destructive impact.
In both cases one could attune oneself to the more blended, decaying stages rather than the slightly obvious, lucid ones. If the detailed explanations in writing that recurred all along were quite unnecessary, since the works as such exuded their basic content, the couple of photographic cycles, strangely called installations, turned veritably obvious in their documentary-didactic character.
Instead of illustrating the story about "Bricks" being manufactured by desperate farmers who now make the land infertile or coming close to religiosity while capturing the stances of people during the "Argya" ritual, the artist should have perhaps based on the broader expressiveness of such wonderful shots as one with labourers kneading soil as though its was a body or a number of takes with worshippers' backs against the darkly luminous, rippling water.
Hebbar remembered
"A Tribute to K K Hebbar", the exhibition (CKP, June 25 to 27) which was part of the larger Hebbar festival organised by Art Mantram and The K K Hebbar Art Foundation, besides a delectable, as always, gamut of his drawings, housed a fair number of works, almost all of them paintings, that together were set out to indeed pay homage to the much loved predecessor whose birth centenary happens this year.
However well-meant and adequate in stressing the kind of aesthetic and thematic fields associated with Hebbar's modernist-indigenist-abstract sources, the selection looked at times more old-fashioned than his own oeuvre. The senior artists, maybe in accordance with this profile, represented to a significant degree officially acceptable names.
Starting rightly with Hebbar's daughter Rekha Rao's child portrait and an abstraction, the show ranged from S G Vasudev's new take on the tree of life to the virtually same styles of Khande Rao, Vijay Sindhur, M B Patil or Srikant Shetty, the only relief being Chandranath Acharya's consummate marriage of realism and cartooning.