“What is India today?” is the question that Centre Pompidou seeks to answer with its blockbuster summer exhibition, Paris-Delhi-Bombay. An ambitious question, if there was one, this show brings together nearly 50 artists from India and France to address the idea of India and what it entails.
Physically and logically clustered into six themes of Politics, Urban Development & Environment, Religion, Home, Identity, and Arts & Crafts, works of art emanate from a central ‘documentation area’. Lying literally at the heart of the exhibition and assembled around Ravinder Reddy’s Tara (2007), this circular, vermillion-colored space attempts to provide an overview of each of these themes and provides supporting material in the form of maps, statistics, and census data.
Paris-Delhi-Bombay
Among the exhibiting artists are such well-known names as Subodh Gupta (Ali Baba, 2011), Bharti Kher (Reveal The Secrets That You Seek, 2011), Sheela Gowda (Gallant Hearts, 1996), Jitish Kallat (Ignitaurus, 2008) and Sudarshan Shetty (Six Cages, 2010) with their trademark styles and personal visions. Pushpamala N.’s collaboration with Parisian photography studio Harcourt produced an engaging series of three performance photographs inspired by iconic French paintings. In this Indo-French exchange of artistic ideas, this partnership was the only one of its kind in the entire exhibition. The superior quality of its outcome cannot be underlined enough. While Pushpamala N.’s work reinterprets existing works, filmmaker Ayisha Abraham uses found footage of amateur home movies shot between the 1950s and 70s to create a dreamlike video collage of family life in India (Enroute or Of A Thousand Moons, 2010-11).
Ali Baba (2010-11) by Subodh Gupta
The Spy (2009) by Pushpamala N. in collaboration with Studio Harcourt. [This image has been linked to its source at Le FigaroNotable, too, is the inclusion of work by several performance makers such as Nikhil Chopra and Kiran Subbaiah (While The Mouth Is Still Full, 1997). Sonia Khurana’s whimsical video-based investigations of the human body and its perceptions provided for a silent chuckle (Lone Women Don’t Lie, 1999 and Head-Hand, 2004), just around the corner from Sunil Gupta’s photo-fictional exploration of the relationship of a gay Indian hero with his older French lover (Sun City, 2010-11). Kader Attia’s documentary collages (Collages, 2011) bring together the stories of three transsexuals in Paris, Algiers, and Mumbai, two of whom visited each other as Attia filmed their exchange of experiences. Remarkably, the themes addressed in these exhibits (over two-thirds of which were produced especially for this project) are explored with great depth and nuance that resists convenient pre-conceptions. If one were to gather insight into India through the work of the artists, then one would come away with a vibrant idea indeed. Paris-Delhi-Bombay
While the displays in this exhibition enthrall, their interpretation by text panels disappoints: in trying to dissect and map a complex, contradictory sub-continent, Paris-Delhi–Bombay comes across as an over-simplified attempt to impose order on the often slippery notion of India. While the device of sociological cross-examination may have seemed appealing in the presentation of a nation, it is little more than superficial in this case: India never was, nor is a homogenous entity; it isn’t, nor will ever be a unified, distinct culture. To present it as such with vast, sweeping overviews in the information section allows the exhibition experience to lapse into a pastiche of pop-culture references: the selection on Home is illustrated with clips from the Hindi film Swades while the wall on Religion is crowned with a camp diorama of Goddess Durga raising her hand in benediction. The exhibition text offers no more than exoticism to the average French visitor who has never traveled to India. To me, it was an appalling re-iteration of clichés that foreigners tend to associate with India. Paris-Delhi-Bombay
If the purpose of the text accompanying this exhibition is to provide a context in which the work of the French and Indian artists can be intelligently viewed, then clearly, it falls short of the mark. The art on display multiplies the concept of India at every corner, and one feels as though the India the artists speak of is a world removed from the two-dimensional space described by the curators. Unfortunately, this is the case: a delicate and sensitive approach to introducing Indian and Indian art could have significantly enriched the visitor’s experience, whether he is a lover of all things Indian or a newcomer to the subject.
Paris-Delhi-Bombay