Vivek Vilasini

Born 1964 in Trishur, Kerala, India Lives and works in Bangalore, India Before multimedia artist and photographer Vivek Vilasini began studying art and sculpture with traditional Indian craftsmen he was a radio officer at the All India Marine College in Kochi. In his art Vilasini is known for working with the social structures prevalent in contemporary Indian society. He is interested in defining cultural identity while also taking a critical stance on globalisation. In the photo collage Between one Shore and several Others (Just what is it…after Richard Hamilton) from 2008, Vilasini refers to an iconic work of art by Richard Hamilton. Hamilton was a British painter and collage artist who, with his 1965 collage Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, created one of the very first Pop Art works. Vilasini uses digital manipulation to reinterpret Hamilton’s iconic image, imbuing it with a particularly Indian sensibility. By using image fragments from Indian popular culture, from news media, advertising, and Bollywood films he meshes Eastern and Western iconographies. Vilasini reintroduces predefined roles in a new context while discussing the modern global age. For example, the work explores how the vitality of modern Indian art is born out of economic and political change, media impacts, and by the rivalry between cultural traditions and globalisation. Vilasini’s collage highlights how our own history is always related to social history – to the mutual interdependencies affecting the development of both. Thus, the work can affect and generate cultural and social awareness in the spectator. Stine Kleis Hansen

Vivek Valasini Between one Shore and several Others (Just what is it...after Richard Hamilton), 2008

Hema Upadhyay

Born 1972 in Baroda, Gujarat, India Lives and works in Mumbai, India From a high vantage point – above the shacks with their blue plastic cover-ings seeking to ward off the merciless rain – Hema Upadhyay looks out across her city, Mumbai. Upadhyay views the city as a provisory entity that may disappear or be removed at any time, a disturbing object of desire. By placing photographs of herself in her works she looks for her own place within this city of dreams. Her paintings, collages, and sculptural installations keep coming back to themes such as one’s native soil, loss, migration, and belonging. Upadhyay was born and raised in Baroda, where, in the early 1990s, she began studying painting and subsequently graphic art at the Faculty of Fine Arts. While still a student, she began infusing her works with personal narratives. In 1998 she moved to Mumbai to embark on a new life in this metropolitan city. In her mind, this relocation became intermingled with her family’s memories of their enforced relocation from Pakistan in connection with the 1947 Partition. She peopled her surfaces with photographs of herself while struggling to gain access to her new city. I Have a Feeling That I Belong, a work from 2001 – part of a series entitled Sweet, Sweat Memories – sees the artist poised on the balcony of a tall building, letting her gaze glide across the complex while her body is balanced precariously close to the edge. Critics have interpreted this autobiographical positioning of herself in the role of the main protagonist as a gender-specific comment on spatial issues. These works are characterised by a deliberate play with scale, dimensions, and a sense for diminishing forms, for reducing scale. A particularly poignant work from 2002 was a site-specific installation entitled The Space in Between You and Me created for the Khoj International Artists’ Workshop in Mysore. Upadhyay wrote a letter to her family by sowing millet seeds in the soil. The letters sprung up, grew, and gradually withered away – “as if they never existed”. As far back as 2002 she had already begun work on the first versions of her site-specific installation depicting Dharavi in Mumbai, Asia’s largest slum. If, in earlier works, her multifaceted self enjoyed a sense of freedom and imagination, hovering in the sky above the confines of the slums, the installation Dream a Wish – Wish a Dream was more directly concerned with the materiality of existence, with its details – and with a confrontation with the vulnerability that characterises modern urban life in third-world cities. The installation 8 feet x 12 feet (2009) – which is made out of aluminium sheets, car scraps, enamel paints, tarpaulins, pieces of metal and found objects – swallows up the room, creating a compact whole. Upadhyay is interested in space in its physical sense – in the people, objects, dwellings, and roads that fill out the space and make the city come alive. The installa-tions bring about a bodily experience, possessed of a strong physical at-traction, while also celebrating the wishes, dreams, and hopes that are part of life in the slums, too. Vidya Shivadas

Hema Upadhyay 8 feet x 12 feet, 2009

Kiran Subbaiah

Born 1971, Sidapur, India Lives and works in Bangalore, India Formally trained as a sculptor, Kiran Subbaiah works in a range of media, including assemblage, video and internet art. A common approach of his practice is subverting the form and function of objects, through which he questions the relationship between use and value, highlighting contradictions inherent in everyday life. Irony, deadpan humour and a crude aesthetic provide Subbaiah with simple binaries: functional/defunct, action/reaction and cause/effect to tease out his ideas and observations. Often found-object sculptures are manipulated by Subbaiah into paradoxes. Thirst, 1998, presents a glass tumbler that is anything but refreshing, in that it contains pebbles and is precariously balanced between mouth-drying materials: a mound of salt and a tower of plaster, cloth, tissue paper, expanded polystyrene and cotton wool. Love All, 1999, is a football with a tessellated surface studded by unlit matches positioned for kick-off on a circle of matchbox lighting strips, threatening to ignite the ball should a match commence. In public spaces, Subbaiah uses the language and format of street-signs and official notices. With phrases such as ‘Prohibitions Strictly Forbidden’ and ‘Ignore This Corner’ or symbols such as a bicycle with feet instead of wheels, he challenges the authority of such common directions over the public who are expected to adhere to their rules. The artist becomes actor in his videos, performed in an earnest, deadpan seriousness. Flight Rehearsals, 2003, extends Subbaiah’s interest in subversion beyond objects, to an overturning the conception of gravity and scale. The camera is angled so Subbaiah appears to ‘fly’, having discovered the secret of flight is to repeatedly jump before gravity has time to act. The action moves to a bedroom, where a ringing alarm clock in the “foreground” is actually oversized and distant, creating an unsettling distortion of the sense of space as first perceived. Under the heading of net.art on his website (www.geocities.com/antikiran), Subbaiah presents a number of internet and computer-based projects. These include a series of downloadable mock-viruses that simulate an attack on the computer, complete with shrieks of pain from the machine. Computer viruses interest the artist particularly as something that exists between function and dysfunction - their purpose is to drain the use-value out of a computer. Subbaiah’s website also presents as yet unrealised ideas and propositions, which are themselves social commentaries. These include a toilet roll dispenser that prints sheets with up-to-the-minute news reports, reflecting on the contemporary appetite for uninterrupted access to information and the speed with which news is disposed. He also proposes an amplifier and loud-speaker for bicycle horns, to help cyclists combat the brutal use of vehicular horns in Indian cities. Commenting not only on noisy urban life, but on the tendency to fight fire with fire, rather than more peaceful solutions. The artist considers his work as a form of emancipation, whereby objects no longer need to conform to their original use potential. He sees this extended by defining them art objects – as he states ‘I see the whole advantage of making art in the fact that it need not serve any purpose.’ Rebecca Morrild

Kiran Subbaiah Flight Rehearsals, 2003

Dayanita Singh

Born 1961 in New Delhi, India Lives and works New Delhi, India Dayanita Singh is a photographer known for portraits and interior views of Indian domestic life, especially urban-middle and upper-class families documented in the Steidl publication, Privacy, 2003. Singh reveals the nature of relationships between family members and communities. Her abiding interest in poignant narratives is made accessible to her audience through the medium of photography. She uses alternative means to achieve accessibility that supersedes the gallery system. For instance she has produced posters and calendars that are distributed openly with the expectation that the viewer will take the work home and install it within her own domestic space. This is a response to and comments on the commodification of art and culture prevalent today as well as a means of shifting the interior views of her broad audience. Her first photographic series documented the tabla maestro Zakir Hussain. This developed for Singh into a symbiotic relationship with her subject, as well as the medium of photography. She gained insight and a sense of Hussain’s way of life, while capturing him, which in turn provided insights for him into his photographic presence revealing over their extended exchange depths of his character that were not previously apparent. This relationship initiated a journey of self-discovery both for Singh and her subjects that has resulted in numerous intimate and elegant images. Singh’s earliest photographic series are in black and white. With an absence of colour articulating departure, memory and loss and are depicted most tenderly in Go Away Closer, 2007. With her accordion book, Chairs, 2001 Singh gave 10 books each to friends she felt were vital points of contact and asked them to disseminate the books to other friends, resulting in a sort of aural transfer of her visual production. The concertina format permits expandability making her books constant works-in-progress and allows for a teleological sequencing. Singh has transformed 7 of her journeys into a series of accordion books known as Sent a Letter, 2008 which are like portable museums. Each is addressed to a fellow traveller. Sent a Letter is encased in a handmade cloth box that reads “SENT A LETTER to my friend on the way he dropped it. Someone came and picked it up and put it in his pocket”, embodying the circularity and random nature of disseminating Singh’s ideas while continuing her engagement with intimate subjects through making the books small-scale and cherished objects. Ladies of Saligao, 2005 is a series in which she photographed women from the village in Goa where she lives. The prints were hung at the local community centre and the women were encouraged to carry their prints home from the exhibition to install in their own homes. Another significant series is Singh’s documentation over a period of 13 years of Mona Ahmed, her closest friend. Singh maps Mona’s intimate life, her adopted daughter, banishment from the community of eunuchs for alcoholism and her eventual illegal activities in a cemetery. Singh has documented several subjects, tracking complex and difficult lives. These images of people working, celebrating or resting show life without embellishment. Singh captures a sense of poignancy not only with human beings but with buildings as well. Her more recent photographs, the Blue Book Series has introduced the element of colour into her work. Although Singh has preferred small-scale and finely printed photography, she has recently been experimenting with other formats. Savita Apte

Dayanita Singh Dream Villa 11 - 2007, 2008

Sudarshan Shetty

Born 1961 in Mangalore, India Lives and works in Mumbai, India Sudarshan Shetty is particularly well known for his large-scale sculptures and installations. His work takes its point of departure in a lyrical world full of playfulness and freedom, unfettered by political questions. Through everyday-like fragments he presents a fascinating combination of the representational and the abstract that reveals different facets of modern society. In addition to this, Shetty often employs simple, subtle distortions in his works, e.g. distortions of scale. In so doing, he breaks down conventions and creates new ideals in an attempt at counteracting existing systems. Shetty has always worked with the concept of boundaries within the realms of the personal, the psychological, the social, and the carnal. He uses specially selected materials to celebrate and define such boundaries and their inevitable demise. Shetty’s early paintings, later installations, and most recent kinetic sculptural assemblages all evince a keen interest in the macabre, the playful, and the seductive. But just as his works consistently evoke emotional responses in his audiences, his works are also contemplative and insightful. In the monumental work Untitled from 2006 he shows a mechanical sculptural installation that animates the cow. In India the cow is regarded as sacred. It is a symbol of goodness, fertility, and the feminine; a kind of mother goddess for the Hindu. Some Indian states even have a ban against slaughtering cows and oxen. Shetty’s sculpture consists of two life-sized skeletal cows, their hooves placed on top of each other. The sculpture was created in connection with a series of works entitled Love, which investigates the phenomenon of love as something that is at turns comical, ironic, and perverse. In Shetty’s works the cows are quite literally naked – cut to the bone. At the same time, they pretend to be making love even though they cannot possibly move. However, the act of physical love taking place between the cows strikes us as neither insistent nor provocative, precisely because the placing of the cows does not facilitate it. The work also turns love into something mechanical: If a spectator passes too closely by the sculpture, the movement sets off a hammer that strikes the udder of one of the cows. To Shetty the main issue does not concern seeing and experiencing the work of art as an aesthetic object; rather, it has to do with how machines and objects in the world have a fleeting, ephemeral quality. In the work he demonstrates an interest in the cow as a national and historical symbol, as something with a jester-like potential for the comically sublime. His inappropriate interventions against the familiar posit his works in a changeable interspace located somewhere between universally shared frames of reference and intimate, private experiences. Stine Kleis Hansen

Sudarshan Shetty Untitled (Double Cow from the show Love), 2006

Tejal Shah

Born 1979 in Bhilai, India Lives and works in Mumbai, India Tejal Shah works in video, photography, performance and installation, blurring boundaries of subject matter and visual language. Informed by a range of sources from different histories and cultures, including her life experiences and stories from the disenfranchised subcultures, Shah is primarily concerned with issues of identity, politics, gender and sexuality. Shah has been working with the body as a gendered and sexualised entity from the outset of her mature work. Much of which is focused on the social and biological constructs of gender. Protagonists are often women, transgendered or transsexual people who have been marginalised by the historical narrative. Shah’s work both references and transcends otherness. What are you? 2006, explores the malleable language of gender, physically manipulated not only by her chosen subjects, the hirja (transgender) community, but also through the deployment of various forms of media. A two-channel video installation with both screens positioned together {Please clarify, is this side by side? Top to bottom? Face to face? Front to back?}, super-8 is fused with video-style footage, which flows into formal portraiture, woven within found footage not only to reflect an interest in the formal aspects of her work but also replicating the complexities of the hirjas’ life and the ways in which they negotiate and live with their identity. A vortex of emotion and aesthetics - at once celebratory, humorous and fantastical, the work becomes a site of contestation and transformation where the hirja protagonists become the potential artisans of a new vision; the work becomes an emphatic form of activism that proposes a utopian vision of gender. Produced during the artist’s residency in Paris, the video There is always something absent, 2007–08, follows Shah’s interest in the systematic control of women’s sexuality, madness and mental illness. Collaborating with the Paris-based dancer and choreographer Marion Perrin, the work critically deals with the historical and social constructs, such as female hysteria. The narrative focuses on the story of Augustine, a patient at the Salpêtrière Hospital from 1875 to 1880. Through the juxtaposition of images from past and present, which creates an affinity that links us to the women trapped by the ‘hospitality’ of the Salpêtrière, combined with the clinical recitals from Dr. Charcot’s notes, Shah questions accepted historical imaginings and social constructs of gender; it is only when the protagonist escapes, disguised as a man, is she finally allowed to express her feelings. As well as the exploration of gender and sexuality, Shah also deals with the concepts of religion, national identity, self and community in her acclaimed film, I Love My India, 2003. Situated within the conditions of state sponsored genocide against the minority Indian Muslim community in Gujarat (2002), Shah dispels the purported notion of India as one of the world’s largest democracies. Filmed and narrated by the artist in the banal location of a public recreational ground at Nariman Point, Mumbai, combined with the format of an opinion poll, the candid and direct testimonies ranging from loss, apathy, prejudice and ignorance not only question democracy at a local level but also humanity. Within the post-9/11 context, the video asks the viewer to re-examine his own political stance and poses the questions whether it has become more acceptable to commit such acts of violence when the war on terror has been positioned as a universal cause and the bulwark of democracy.   Leila Hasham

Tejal Shah I Love My India, 2003

Jagannath Panda

Born 1970 in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India Lives and works in New Delhi, India Jagannath Panda holds two masters’ degrees in Sculpture, one from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda, 1994, and a later degree from the Royal College of Art, London, 2002. Panda is known for creating images that are deceptively simple. Often, his works consist of light, linear drawings and melting or liquid shapes placed on the surface. At the same time, the works also reflect conflicts between ecology and development, nature and technology. Panda’s works are often inspired by his immediate surroundings: Orissa, his native state, and his current home in chaotically urban New Delhi. For example, he mixes the traditional palm leaf drawings of Orissa with architectural motifs showing multinational enterprises and call centres from New Delhi. In so doing, the artist illustrates the paradoxical co-existence of different worlds while also highlighting how the success of the business community is creating palpable change within Indian society. Through his art, Panda brings together many binary opposites, juxtaposing nature and culture, the urban and the rural, tradition and innovation, and the figurative and the abstract. In his works he brings together these opposing scenarios to form a coherent whole through deft colour treatment and a personal aesthetic sensibility. Animal life also plays an important part in the artist’s circle of motifs. Animals represent people, gods, or the cycle of life. The work God and Goat from 2007 casts a goat as the main protagonist. The goat is a symbol for sacrifices to the gods, but in some cases it can also be an avatar of the god Prakriti. In Hinduism, Prakriti represents Mother Nature, and it may be in order to accentuate this symbolism that Panda has an umbilical cord, terminating in a red cloth ball, emanate from the goat’s belly. The goat is also decked out in a range of patterns reminiscent of embroidery and painted in the colours red, black, and white. These colours can represent the three spiritual qualities: ’Sattva’, goodness and happiness; 'Rajaher’, passion and movement; and finally ’Tamas’: darkness and ignorance. Panda’s staging of the goat reclining on a pewter box is a testament to an enchanted universe where modern-day rationality locks horns with religion and fantasy. India’s contrasts between past and present are powerfully expressed in the artist’s work. Stine Kleis Hansen

Jagannath Panda God and Goat, 2007

Nalini Malani

Born 1946 in Karachi, Pakistan Lives and works in Mumbai, India Nalini Malani emerged at a time when the Indian art scene was male dominated. Amongst a new generation of women artists who wove personal narratives and histories into their practice, her early works were cathartic autobiographies. The female protagonists of her paintings expressively negotiate family relationships. With a focus on the body, interaction and layering becomes a metaphor to illustrate the complexities of Indian society and the emotions they elicit: oppression, anxiety, self absorption and anger. Working initially with overtly Indian themes, Malani eventually sexualised and de-gendered her female protagonists, highlighting the extreme roles for women in Indian society from urban proletarian to street acrobat. Her focus has been on unconventional women – Mad Meg from Breughel’s painting, Medea, Sita, Radha, Akka, Alice from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Some of these women existed, others are legend, each subverted male dominated social customs to define new roles. Figures appear in isolation or intertwined – not in expected contexts but in multilayered narratives open to interpretation. Malani started to receive international acclaim in the 1980s and in the 1990s she became part of India’s first-generation of video artists. Her practice also encompasses multi-media installation and experimental theatre, although painting and drawing remain central. Her experimentation in post-painterly media is for her a means of retrieving the early experience of learning to paint. Video provides unrestricted spatial and temporal density with which to explore a painterly approach. Always attuned to global discourses which shape female identity Nalini uses a singularly personal idiom which weaves local history and social issues to communicate her position. Her works are populated with appropriated and reappropriated imagery, which furthers her narrative, in itself often a telling and a retelling within a work. Her collaboration in the performance Medeamaterial inspired her to explore human emotions and their expression through bodily changes. In her installations she combines painting with light and shadow. The first of these works came about following a stage-set designed by the artist for a theatre production in which actors interacted with painted forms on stage, in her art installations, however, the human presence is removed. These works further explore layering especially as she paints onto transparent cylinders that rotate with light projected through them to populate the room with shadows. Referencing Buddhist prayer wheels whose rotations express a desire for change within the stability of cyclical continuity; the cylinders’ revolutions and images build a continuous narrative of epic proportions that appears and vanishes simultaneously. Accompanied by music and text, the historical, cultural, personal and psychological elements combine to present allegories of political and ecological dangers, with images recalling the horrors of war, the industrial revolution, and the utopia/dystopia that followed. The twelve piece suite entitled Tales of Good and Evil featured in Indian Highway allude to forms of communication and oral transmission of tales, myths and legends of Indian origin which were transmitted through the centuries via the great commercial arteries of roads which linked north and south and east and west. Savita Apte, Rebecca Morrild

Nalini Malani Part Object, 2008

Bose Krishnamachari

Born 1963 in Kerala, India Lives and works in Mumbai, India Bose Krishnamachari is an artist and curator whose artistic practice includes bold abstract paintings, figurative drawings, sculpture, photography and multimedia installations. While stylistically varied, a common thread throughout his work is a critique of power structures that operate within the art world and more broadly in contemporary society. In his first solo show in 1990, Krishnamachari deployed a minimalist style, producing an abstract black on black with white perforated paper, reminiscent of Braille. As viewers could neither touch nor read the language an ironic comment on contemporary culture, and art gallery decorum in particular could be understood. In both his art and his curating, Krishnamachari examines the art historical canon and exposes its inequalities. De-Curating – Indian Contemporary Artists, 2003, included 94 sketches and paintings of living Indian artists – both well-established and emerging practitioners. The works resulted from three years of travelling across India, meeting, talking, photographing and drawing. This journey was, in his words, ‘a hand-made tribute to the memory of that “whole-time worker”, the artist’ and undermines the value judgements of art history, presenting the artists as equally significant. Krishnamachari’s desire to support and promote lesser-known artists also extends to his curatorial activities he has previously devised exhibitions that offer Indian artists visibility in larger cities and opportunities for exposure within the international contemporary art world. Other works by Krishnamachari look beyond the art world, and seek to examine the psyche of the ‘average Mumbaikar’ and make visible what he describes as the ‘ocean of anxieties that have arisen from the everyday question of acceptance’. One series includes six large ballpoint pen portraits of household staff from the artist’s Mumbai residence, as well as 108 photographic portraits of individuals who participant in the artist’s life, keeping alive the encounters he had with them. These works are a reminder of how the wealth and class are still dividers in contemporary Indian society. The large-scale multimedia installation Ghost / Transmemoir 2008 takes a different approach to mapping Mumbai. The work comprises 108 used tiffin boxes suspended from a frame and wired with headphones and miniature screens. Tiffin boxes play a central role in Indian life, with millions being filled daily by housewives, collected, exchanged, re-exchanged and sorted until the right home-cooked lunch reaches the right office-worker. Overall, the installation captures some of the buzz and chaos of the street, while the small screens present interviews with people from Mumbai. These portray their thoughts, celebrations, frustrations, religions and emotions, and are a reminder of the individual voices and stories to be found amongst a total of 20.8 million Mumbaikar. In another installation, Krishnamachari takes a more overtly political standpoint, commenting on the press conference platforms used by the perpetrators of war to justify their actions. White Builders and the Red Carpets, 2008, presents 108 microphones on a long red table, poised for a press conference. Behind the table, 13 white chairs with backs shaped like imposing architectural forms, represent the kind of powerful individuals who would address the press at such an event symbolising their ambitions as ‘builders’ - who perpetuate wars for economic gain. The specific number of chairs is also a reference to Leonard Da Vinci’s The Last Supper and a reminder of the frequent role played by religion in the culture of war. White Builders and the Red Carpets is also a commentary on the distribution of information, and how crucial it may be for survival in the new media era where numerous 24 hour news channels operate where once there was scant distribution and access to such media. Rebecca Morrild

Bose Krishnamachari Ghost / Transmemoir, 2006-08

Riyas Komu

Born 1971, Kerala, India Lives and works in Mumbai and Kerala, India Riyas Komu earned his MA in Fine Arts from the Sir JJ School of Art, Mumbai, in 1999, and in 2007 he attracted attention in Europe with his exhibition at the Venice Biennial. The artist’s oeuvre spans several media and genres, but his primary vehicles are sculpture, photography, and video installations. Strong political undercurrents are a distinctive feature of Komu’s art. Affected by his father’s political views and his own experiences as an active member of political groupings, his works are not content to simply relate a story or hang on a wall; they look back at the spectator. Komu’s works often refer to India as a country of paradoxes where immense wealth and indescribable poverty cohabit side by side. In recent years India has acquired a new status as a giant in Asia by dint of its continued economic and population growth, exceeded only by China. But even though the country has experienced economic growth, it performs less well in terms of standard indicators for development; here the country ranks alongside low-income countries. Through his art, Komu calls attention to the complex nature of India, his works reflecting both hope and despondency. Komu is also a passionate fan of football. In the work Left Legs Series from 2008 he manages to bring together his fascination with sports and his political awareness. In a series of sculptures of strangely amputated left legs made of concrete, steel, and salvaged teak from Kerala – his native region – he imitates the legs of real football players. The legs feature complex carvings and surreal anatomical details, and are flayed to reveal sinews, muscles, and ligaments The artist refers to how such athletic legs may feel sometimes, pitting the proud and heroic against the weakened and damaged. The work was created in connection with a series of works entitled The Iraq Project; a series which focuses on how Iraqi football has been caught up in political power struggles during the reign of Saddam Hussein and during the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Komu has created an ambivalent work: by referring to the athlete’s body, it incarnates pain and loss for every victory and every defeat. By using symbolism and iconographies of varying kinds, the artist offers his spectators a creative space for contemplation. Stine Kleis Hansen

Riyas Komu Left Leg Series, 2008

Bharti Kher

Born 1969 in London, UK Lives and works in New Dehli, India Working with sculpture, photography and painting, Bharti Kher explores issues of personal identity, social roles and Indian traditions but also from a broader perspective, 21st century issues around genetics, evolution, technology and ecology. Kher uses the bindi as a central motif in her work, transforming the surfaces of both sculptures and paintings to connect disparate ideas. The bindi is a forehead decoration traditionally made with red pigment and worn by Hindu men and women. It represents the ‘third eye’ the all-knowing intrinsic wisdom and is a symbol of marital status. Recently bindis have been transformed into stick-on vinyl, disposable objects and a secular, feminine fashion accessory. In Kher’s work, the bindi transcends its mass-produced diminutiveness becoming a powerful stylistic and symbolic device, creating visual richness and allowing a multiplicity of meanings, including tensions inherent in shifting definitions of femininity in contemporary India. Kher’s early figurative paintings explore a female perspective of modern India's patriarchal society through representations of contemporary Indian interiors. Depicting a pluralism with ancient Indian customs juxtaposed with modern Western values, Kher reveals how, while increasingly receptive to foreign influence, many Indians still remain reverent of their own culture in an overtly conspicuous fashion. This clash of cultures is very apparent to Kher - a British-born child of the Indian Diaspora who has, in contrast to dominant outward migration trends, moved to India as an adult. Recently her panel paintings have been covered with thousands of bindi creating abstract arrangements encoded with patterns of exile, immigration, crossing boundaries and the passage of time. In response to repressions towards women in India, a number of works by Kher denounce domestic tyrannies that define many women’s lives. In The Girl with the Hairy Lip said No, 2004, Kher disrupts a table laid for a tea-party with broken chinaware, false-teeth and a hair-lined cup, at once critiquing both the English custom of afternoon tea and the Indian bride-viewing tea rituals for arranged marriage ceremonies, with reference to Méret Oppenheim’s surrealist fur lined tea cup. Animals are another recurring theme in Kher’s work, serving as a metaphor for the body and transformation. I've seen an elephant fly, 2002, is a hyper-realistic, life-sized fibreglass sculpture of a grey elephant, covered with white sperm-shaped bindis. While in Buddist and Hindu mythology the white elephant is sacred, in the West, it is a metaphor for something frivolous and useless. In I've seen an elephant fly, grey skin is clearly visible behind a white covering, which emphasises the second skin, thereby confusing its identity and value. Kher poses questions about her own complex identity. In The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own, 2006 the elephant reappears as a pathos-inducing figure leaving the viewer unsure whether death or recovery is the next stage. This exploration of ‘inbetween-ness’ with an absence of cause and reason are recurrent themes for Kher. In the sculpture Solarum Series, 2007 Kher returns to the natural world. The tree, a potent symbol that appears in ancient mythologies from many cultures Kher uses such references and combines them with contemporary references, likebiological cloning. The branches of Solarum Series bear the heads of hundreds of creatures: a disturbing and dystopic vision of a genetically engineered hybrid. Rebecca Morrild

Bharti Kher An Abscence of Assignable Cause, 2007

Amar Kanwar

Born 1974 in Mumbai, India Lives and works in Mumbai, India Amar Kanwar is an independent film-maker whose lyrical and meditative work explores the political, social, economic and ecological conditions of the Indian subcontinent. Having directed and produced over 40 films, which are a mixture of documentary, poetic travelogue and visual essay, much of Kanwar’s work traces the legacy of decolonisation and the partition in 1947 of the Indian subcontinent into Islamic Pakistan and Hindu India. Recurrent themes are the splitting of families, sectarian violence and border conflicts, interwoven with investigations of gender and sexuality, philosophy and religion, as well as the opposition between globalisation and tribal consciousness in rural India. Kanwar’s compelling films are created using image, ritual objects, literature, poetry and songs. Rather than focusing on traumatic or political situations, he attempts to move beyond trauma and its direct representation to a more contemplative space. He experimented with this strategy in his most celebrated film, A Season Outside, 1998, exploring the border tensions along the thin white line between India and Pakistan. Scripted and narrated by the artist, the work is a personal journey and poignant meditation on the philosophies of violence and non-violence. Along with his numerous single screen films, Kanwar has also developed multi-screen video installations, in which projected films are choreographed to create sophisticated layering of image and meaning within a conscripted space. In The Lightning Testimonies, 2007, he reflects upon a history of conflict in the Indian subcontinent through experiences of sexual violence, especially in the wake of the political unrest that followed the Partition, where 75,000 women were abducted and abused. Eight synchronised projections present disparate narratives that converge. Women from different times and regions come forward as stories are revealed through people as well as through the images and objects that survive as silent witnesses. The Lightning Testimonies explores how such violence is resisted, remembered and recorded and moves beyond the realm of suffering into a space of quiet contemplation, where resilience creates the potential for transformation. Beyond its immediate subject matter, the work also examines the contrasting methodologies and vocabularies used by different individuals and communities for archiving and recalling memory. Kanwar’s latest work is a three-part installation, The Torn First Pages, 2008-, which examines the political and humanitarian situation in Burma and the struggle between dictatorial regime and the Democracy Movement. The title of the work is related to the story of a bookshop owner in Mandalay in the mid-1990s accused and subsequently convicted and imprisoned for tearing out the first page of every book he sold. The extracted pages were printed with a legally required slogan of the military regime and a denunciation of democratic forces. His action thus represented a private yet powerful resistance against the repressive authorities, pertinent to the artist’s experience of Burma. The Torn First Pages: Part I, a five-channel projection onto paper sheets, presents films shot clandestinely in Burma, India, Europe, the US and Thailand where Kanwar located exiled Burmese communities. Independent stories are connected by a metaphorical reference to the struggle for a democratic society, exile, memory and individual courage. Rebecca Morrild

Amar Kanwar The Lightning Testimonies, 2007

Jitish Kallat

Born 1974 in Mumbai, India Work and lives in Mumbai, India Jitish Kallat’s practice combines painting, photography, and collage, as well as large-scale sculptures and multi-media installations. Jitish graduated from the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, in 1996, part of a group of precocious and ambitious young artists who have been instrumental in globalising Indian contemporary art. Kallat honed his interest in painting through embracing abstraction within the tenants of high modernism, learning to exploit colour to elicite an emotive response. Audacious and self confident, Kallat firmly rejected abstraction and any loyalty to high modernism by the time of his first solo show, within two years out of art school. Entitled PTO, the show was the first in a series of exhibitions which co-opted the allegiance of multiple gallery spaces, in this case spanning north and south Mumbai. Kallat’s early works incorporated references to the style, form and thematic concerns of urban billboards, which were interwoven with popular culture, news stories, media events and the socio-economic and political anxieties of the citizens of Mumbai. Jitish has since been widely recognised for figurative paintings highlighting the convergences of cultural dualities of Mumbai. Kallat’s pieces are large-scale, ambitious presenting a sleek portrayal of the politics, poverty, dirt and grime of Mumbai. Dystopic narratives of urban life, are portrayed as romantic or heroic to achieve the high gloss of globally acceptable contemporary art. With his series Rickshawpolis in 2005, Kallat initiated his engagement with vehicles and snarled traffic as metaphors for modern cities like Mumbai, Shanghai and Dubai. For Kallat rickshaws have become a recurring motif for city dwellers and urban dissonance. For his suite of photographs titled 365 Lives, he documented dented skeletal remains of vehicles, each dent corresponding to a wound. His bold, somewhat confrontational style recalls the energy and audacity of his native Mumbai whilst his signature works contain an underlying edge of brutality. Kallat’s use of lenticular prints began with Death of Distance, 2006, a photographic series that critiques the vast, insatiable twenty four hour news channels broadcast in India. A giant rupee coin stands on edge next to a series of lenticular prints juxtaposing two news reports shifting from one text to another depending on the viewer's position. One reports the launch of a new telecommunications plan, announcing "call anywhere in India for one rupee"; the other recounts the story of a young Indian girl who committed suicide because her mother could not give her one rupee to buy a school meal. A lenticular print displays a succession of images within a single frame. A change in the viewing angle can convey the illusion of three dimensionality creating a sense of animation. The truth is not in any single image but is situated somewhere in between. In the photo pieces Cenotaph (A Deed Of Transfer), 2007, Kallat documents the demolition of a row of illegally built slum dwellings which were situated on the Tulsi Pipe Road, part of his childhood drive to and from school. The slum dwellers were re-located as a result of widening roads and adding pavements while modernising Mumbai. Cenotaph documents the stages of the removal of the slum-dwellers which when viewed from different angles, extends the narrative. In turn the documentation itself may be viewed as an optimistic part of urban development, better infrastructure, wider and cleaner roads or it may be viewed as an act of brutality and violence against voiceless individuals who are deemed to stand in the way of urban progress. Savita Apte

Jitish Kallat Cenotaph (A Deed of Transfer), 2007

N S Harsha

Born 1969 in Mysore, India Lives and works in Mysore, India N S Harsha’s wide-ranging work includes detailed figurative painting and drawing, semi-abstract panels, sculptures and installations, site-specific projects and community-based collaborations. Harsha is celebrated for his reworking of the tradition of Indian miniature painting, assimilating Mughal, Pahari and Rajasthani schools and translating them to the monumental style of traditional wall paintings. Like other stalwarts of the Baroda School, Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh and Bupen Khakkar on whose foundations he builds, Harsha embraces the modern Indian narrative enriched with popular art forms as a platform for a powerful social and political commentary. As the miniature painting format has regularly been used to highlight social and political inequities, Harsha’s reference to them represents an embrace of the tradition updated by his personal idiom to embody contemporary conditions. His large-scale and intricately detailed canvases depict a microcosm of Indian life. The multitude of figures are all animated in unison and focused on an incongruous or comically strange event. Or they are animated by some mutual curiosity. Harsha’s paintings wittily combine rites and rituals common to Indian life with images drawn from world news. This tendency is most poignantly evident in Smoke Goes Up Smoke Goes Down Your Search For Me Is Always On, part of a cycle of twelve paintings made between 2004 and 2006. Ultimately Harsha’s works are a sensitive and empathetic depiction of the human condition alluding to the convergence of local and global concerns, refracted through the prism of his life in Mysore city. Mass Marriage, is an extension of his concerns about diversity revealed through repetition and multiplicity, strategies which pervade his paintings as well as his installation works. Other paintings are vignettes featuring characters set against a dark background. Some are straightforward critiques of the art-world while others highlight the increasing tension between poor rural and rich urban communities as city developers encroach on farming land. Agricultural labourers are depicted as subservient to educated city figures with suits and briefcases. This imbalance is emphasised further by the provocative texts incorporated into his paintings such as They Will Manage My Hunger, 2005. Harsha’s large-scale installation Cosmic Orphans, 2006, was a site-specific painting installed at the Sri Krishnan Temple, created for the Singapore Biennale. Harsha covered the entire surface of the ceiling above the inner sanctum and directly on the floor surrounding the temple’s tower with paintings of sleeping figures reminiscent of the multitudes that sleep helpless on platforms at Indian railway stations in the eternal wait for trains that never arrive. Harsha deliberately chose temple spaces not normally associated with traditional painting. Indian cultural inheritance having strong taboos against stepping on another human being provokes the audience to consider the boundaries of the sacred and profane so strictly adhered to by the priests. Consequently the pathway to the inner sanctum and onwards towards transcendence becomes an insurmountable boundary. For the Serpentine, this idea of an insurmountable boundary is evident in the site specific wall painting Harsha has produced. He depicts a crowd restrained by a makeshift fence Harsha painted directly on the gallery wall, here it is the audience being confronted and asked to think about their relationship to the crowd.   Savita Apte, Rebecca Morrild

N S Harsha Come give us a speech, 2008

Subodh Gupta

Born 1964 in Khagaul, Bihar, India Lives and works in New Dehli, India Subodh Gupta’s practice shifts between different mediums including painting, sculpture, photography, video and performance. Throughout his work, he uses objects that are recognisable icons of Indian life – domestic kitchenware, such as stacked stainless steel tiffin boxes and symbols of the street such as bicycles, scooters and taxis. By relocating them from their original context and placing them in museums and galleries, he elevates their status from common object to valued artwork. Born in a small town in the northern province of Bihar, one of the poorest regions of India Gupta completed a painting degree in Patna before moving to New Delhi. His experience of the stark contrasts between rural and urban experiences and cultural dislocation are themes that permeate his artistic practice. His work is a commentary on the threat to traditional ways of life resulting from India’s rapid modernisation and urbanisation. In Pure, 2000, Gupta is filmed covered in a thick layer of cow dung, then hosed off in a shower. Cow dung is a domestic fuel for many Indian homes, but also used for ritual cleansing in villages, something Gupta observed was a tradition not transferred to city life. He reflects on such differences in a series of sculptures entitled Cow, where he juxtaposes bicycles and scooters with milk-churns, representing his surprise at seeing milk being delivered on bikes in cities rather than being collected directly from the cow. Gupta is acclaimed for communicating effectively on both local and global levels. He has exhibited widely to an international audience, presenting indigenous elements of his culture through an immediately accessible language and aesthetic. He liberally employs clichés about the concerns and preoccupations of the Indian populace with humour and touching sentimentality. Gupta is particularly celebrated for sculptural installations of shiny brass, copper, aluminium or stainless-steel kitchenware – bowls, plates, pots, pans, cutlery and other cooking utensils – such as in Curry, 2005. Such objects are now commonplace in kitchens across India but are still powerful signifiers of middle-class aspirations for prestige and sophistication. In his large-scale installation, The Silk Route, 2007, tiffin boxes are stacked high and rotate on a conveyor belt, creating a dizzying array of gleaming towers that echoes the skyscrapers of India’s ever expanding cities. Other works by Gupta explore India’s increasingly globalised vision of travel and the economic migration of its workforce. Bulging packages - ghathris - are cast in bronze and presented on a rotating airport baggage carousel, as in his large-scale installation Across Seven Seas, 2004 or precariously balanced on the roof of a sinking Ambassador taxi as in Everything Is Inside, 2004. Such bundles contain the prized consumer goods brought back to India by migrant workers travelling from the Gulf States and represent their pride in bringing back wealth for their families. The recent work, Gandhi's Three Monkeys, 2008, is an overtly political work, which makes reference to India’s famous hero of peace ironically portrayed as three colossal heads in militaristic headgear. Using worn and patinaed brass domestic utensils, the forms of a soldier’s helmet, a terrorist's hood and a gas mask reinforce Gupta's dialectics of war and peace, public and private, global and local: themes that run throughout his work.  Rebecca Morrild

Subodh Gupta Date by Date, 2008

Shilpa Gupta

Born 1976 in Mumbai, India Lives and works in Mumbai, India Shilpa Gupta is an interdisciplinary artist who uses interactive video, photography and performance to query and examine themes of consumer culture, desire, security, militarism and human rights. Much of Gupta’s work relies on audience participation with the viewer challenged to respond, in order to extend the meaning of, or even to complete the work’s meaning; a social activist whose works are to be activated. The viewer who engages with one of her works is invited to follow a series of steps, through which, the viewer might reasonably presume the meaning would be revealed. Instead, Gupta strands participants with ambiguity and uncertainty, speculating on the work’s intention. In a broader social and political context, Gupta reflects on ways in which we comply with specific codes of conduct and ordering devices generated by hegemonic groups, enabling them to administrate the masses. This is echoed in the video projection, Untitled, 2004, presented at the Lyon Biennale, where spectators are visually captured and transformed into shadows by a live camera. Through this medium spectators perform in a live computer game of simulated landscapes and shadow play, forming an integral part of the narrative. While questioning of our lived and perceived realities, Gupta resists the notion of art as a commodity. Her choice of medium and presentation spaces exemplifies this resistance to commodification - the artwork becomes an experience rather than a coveted object, with a symbiosis between the viewer/participant and the artist. The issue of authorship is key to Gupta’s practice, resonating clearly in the performance work There is no explosive here, 2007. The viewer is encouraged to exit the Gallery, entering the public domain carrying a bag with the printed statement ‘There is no explosive here’. Suspicion and uncertainty are raised by this ‘true’ statement, not only for the person carrying the bag but also by those she encounters who read the text in a public space. Gupta blurs the boundary between artist, viewer and the work to create a fluid interaction in which all contributors share responsibility, thereby challenging the embedded racial and social stereotypes and drawing attention to anxieties within society. Blame, 2002 – 04, produced in the context of Aar-Paar, a public art exchange between India and Pakistan (2000 – 05), expounds the utopian vision of blurring cultural, religious and national boundaries. Made in the same year as the Gujarat genocide, which resulted in thousands of Muslims deaths, this work has a poignant resonance. Gupta distributed bottles of simulated blood in and around Mumbai train stations and asked users to establish differences between the various blood’ samples. With the inscription labelled on the bottles, ‘blaming you makes me feel so good, so I blame you for what you cannot control – your religion, your nationality,’ Gupta presents the impossibility of establishing any form of categorisation or seeing differences, and in doing so, transcends the negative implications of religion, nationalism and fanaticism. Employing a variety of media, whether it’s via interactive video installations, performance or photography, Gupta blurs the boundary between art and the culture of everyday life, prompting questions about how we think and who we are.   Leila Hasham

Shilpa Gupta In Our Times, 2008

Sakshi Gupta

Born 1979 in New Delhi, India Lives and works in New Delhi, India Sakshi Gupta recycles scrap materials, often with industrial origins to produce sculptures that transform the meaning of the materials and provoke spiritual contemplation. Out of the a heavy materiality the formsthat she creates evoke an ephemeral lightness and fragility. and tThrough this engagement with material weight, her works can be seen as commentary on the contemporary world – highlighting the shift from the economics of heavy industry to the weightless age of the information and technology. The spectacular sculpture, Some Beasts, 2008, uses rusty iron to create the form of a suspended ceiling fan that itself resembles a writhing beast, in the process of moulting and shrugging off its skin which cascades to the floor. Its domineering presence above the viewer imposes some of the terror and obeisance ceremonially accorded to both the mythical and religious beasts of traditional culture and the machines of war today. Yet the zoomorphic engendering of a mundane domestic object also evokes vulnerability and weariness, highlighting how exhausting the process of transformation in the modern world is. The artist also draws heavily on her ownpersonal experience. The body of works entitled Nothing is Freedom, Freedom is Everything, Everything is You, 2007, refers to the contradictions faced by young people: the hopes and expectations that don’t are not guaranteed to materialise, the struggles and unexpected joys, as well as annew opportunitiesy to make the personal choices that determine personal destiny, which may not have existed for previous generations. The first piece in this series uses 100 locks, each weighing 2kg, welded together to create a collection of seven pillows. Instead of offering rest, these pillows evoke sleepless nights in a claustrophobic environment. The second work uses nuts, bolts, cogs and bearings arranged in a symmetrical pattern on a horizontal surface suggesting a decorative door – of the type often turned into coffee tables –- or a traditional carpet, representing the highs and lows of life. The third sculpture is figurative a bust made out of bicycle chains which Gupta has noted and represents the artist’sher belief that freedom of choice exists within individuals. Landscape of Waking Memories, 2007, combines wire and mesh with chicken feathers to create an object that at first glance resembles a soft, sensual quilt but on closer inspection, reveals itself to be sharp and unyielding. The artist has commented how ‘the places/people who are supposed to bring ease and comfort in my live themselves become the source of disturbance hence making me lose my sense of security’. The spectacular sculpture, Some Beasts, 2008, uses rusty iron to create the form of a suspended ceiling fan that itself resembles a writhing beast, in the process of moulting and shrugging off its skin to the floor. Its domineering presence above the viewer imposes some of the terror and obeisance ceremonially accorded to both the mythical and religious beasts of traditional society and the machines of war today. Yet the zoomorphic engendering of a mundane domestic object also evokes vulnerability and weariness, highlighting how exhausting the process of transformation in the modern world is. Gupta has also produced external site-specific sculptures outdoors, on during residencies and at the twice-yearly artist’s’ workshop she runs in Rajasthan. Continuing to use the principles of ‘poor art’, her exterior works combine discarded materials from local factories with found materials from nature such as roots, fronds and feathers. The objects she creates are frequently anthropomorphised and evoke deliberate unease and anxiety, to represent the sense of discomfort and conflict that the artist feels in her own life.  Rebecca Morrild

Sakshi Gupta Landscape of Waking Memories, 2007

Sheela Gowda

Born 1957 in Bhadravati, India Lives and works in Bangalore, India The practice of Sheela Gowda encompasses a diverse array of media including painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. The materials chosen by Gowda are particularly significant for both the atmosphere they evoke through texture, colour and smell and also their metaphoric potency. She incorporates substances that straddle their everyday presence both in urban and rural India. This includes cow dung, which has sacred implications but is also used as a domestic cooking fuel and building material; gold-leaf and ceremonial dyes used for body adornment and rituals; and domestic materials such as coconut fibre, needles, threads and cord. Gowda’s process-based work frequently blurs the boundary between fine art and craft. Across her practice, she questions the role of female subjectivity in the mix of religion, nationalism and violence that comprises contemporary Indian society. In And Tell Him of My Pain, 1998/2001/2007, Gowda pulled over 100 metres of thread through needles, and then coiled and dyed it with red kumkum (dried turmeric) fixed with gum arabic. The threads are then suspended from walls and draped across spacem so that it becomes a three-dimensional drawing. The meaning of the work is multi-layered. It refers to spice culture – traditionally part of women’s experience - as well as the textile industry, and brings to mind the pain of female domestic life in a patriarchal society. Initially trained as a painter, Gowda’s work changed profoundly in response the crisis she experienced following the fundamentalist Hindu violence and the Mumbai riots of 1992. She abandoned conventional forms of painting and turned to sculpture and installation. While she shies away from using her work to make strident statements, her recent paintings, such as Agneepath, 2006, are more political in subject, drawing on images from the media of urban unrest, conflict and tragedy. Her large-scale sculptures and installations also incorporate commonplace manufactured materials of the type salvaged and recycled by impoverished migrant workers, such as lead plumbing pipes, asphalt, plastic sheeting and metal barrels. Her monumental Darkroom, 2006, is built from metal tar-drums that are stacked unaltered or flattened into sheets. It simultaneously evokes the grandeur of classical colonnades or turreted castle and the simplicity of an ad hoc temporary shelter built by India’s road-workers. Inside the structure, the darkness is broken by tiny dots of light through holes punctured in the metal ceiling, which appear like a constellation of stars. This combination of harshness and lyricism runs through much of Gowda’s work. Gowda is also interested in the idea of material displacement as means of evoking new meaning in objects. In Ground, 2007 she collected discarded Indian grinding stones, rendered obsolete by modern kitchen appliances. She found them on the streets of Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India and a city that has undergone hyperdevelopment in recent years. She dispersed these cooking stones across Lyon during the Biennale. Having been dislocated from their original context these previously unremarkable, abandoned objects became meaningful again and a potent reminder of the speed with which age-old traditions have disappeared.  Rebecca Morrild

Sheela Gowda Darkroom, 2006

Anita Dube

Born 1958 in Lucknow, India Lives and works in New Delhi, India Anita Dube is an art historian and critic turned artist. Her artistic endeavours draw on rich fount of experience and address issues such as mortality, desire, pain, and joy. She is widely represented at exhibitions in India and abroad, and has contributed to workshops and curated numerous exhibitions. Over the years, Dube has developed an aesthetic idiom that employs sculptural fragments made out of e.g. foam, plastic, pearls, prostheses, and glass eyes used for religious sculpture in Asia. Through this variety of found objects she explores a contradictory range of themes that deal with autobiographical losses as well as with losses affecting society as such. Dube’s early artistic experiments are the result of her affinity, in the 1980s, with a group of radical painters and sculptors from Baroda. This artists’ association emerged in the wake of anti-Moslem riots, offering an incisive analysis and criticism of the social and political situation in India at the time. At that point, Dube's work was dedicated to investigating the human body, its tactile properties, and its resilience. In the work Ah (a Sigh) from 2008 Dube shows a blow-up of a black-and-white newspaper photograph featuring protesting Indians of all ages. A row of tree roots covered in velvet is placed on top of the photograph. The roots refer to India’s Hindu roots. The “Tree of Life” is an important symbol in almost all cultures and religions; its branches reaching heaven while its roots are buried deep in the ground. Thus, the tree links the sky, the earth, and the underworld. Within Hinduism, however, the tree is upside-down: The roots are in the sky while the branches are in the ground. In Dube’s work, the roots emphasise the gestures made by the people in the photograph, reaching out to the spectator. The work visualises the people’s protest against decisions made by powerful political leaders who appear to be ruthlessly pursuing their own interests. The hands extended to the spectator can be viewed as a call urging us to take an active interest, whereas the roots can be regarded as emblems of human loss. Without a dynamic democracy India will wither and die like a tree ripped from the ground by its roots. The work offers insight into the complex socio-political struggles being fought within Indian society and into the gap between these struggles and the global struggle for equality and justice. Thus, Ah (a Sigh) brings into play issues of oppression and reconciliation, both in poetic and metaphorical terms.  Stine Kleis Hansen

Anita Dube Ah (a Sigh), 2008

Nikhil Chopra

Born 1974 in Calcutta, India Lives and works in Mumbai, India Nikhil Chopra works at the boundaries between theatre, performance, live art, painting, photography and sculpture. He devises fictional characters that draw on India’s colonial history as well as his own personal history. He inhabits these characters in largely improvised performances that last up to 3 days. Chopra’s character, Sir Raja, was created when he was living in Ohio in 2002. A stereotype of the Indian prince from the country’s colonial era, Chopra uses this alter ego to create tableaux for live performance, film and photographs. In the performance Sir Raja II, 2003, the character could be found at the end of a 350-foot red carpet, seated motionless at a table with spread of food, fruits, and flowers. Here Chopra created a live Vanitas painting and challenged the viewer to confront past and present issues of colonialism, exoticism and excess. The theme of death and references to European painting also appeared in the Mumbai performance The Death of Sir Raja III, 2005, where he lay adorned in silk and jewels, surrounded by velvet drapes and rich oriental rugs, as if he were posing for a painting depicting his own death. While performing, the artist does not interact with the audience, who unlike in theatre, are free to come and go throughout, however the artist’s awareness of their gaze and the constant potential for the boundary between player/viewer to be breached, adds to the tension and intensity. In What will I do with all this land? 2005, Sir Raja is shown journeying on horseback through his vast inherited estate in a series of atmospheric black and white photographs. These portraits of the robed prince alone in the epic landscape of Kashmir are reminiscent of 19th century British Imperial photography of Indian dignitaries. The narratives around Sir Raja do not, however, refer to a specific person or moment in history but is rather woven from Chopra’s personal memory, old family photographs, ancestral home and endless family stories. Chopra’s most recent character, Yog Raj Chitrakar, is loosely based on the artist’s grandfather, Yog Raj Chopra. Educated at Goldsmiths College of Art, London, in the 1920s, Yog Raj Chopra was a frequent open-air landscape painter who spent a large part of middle age capturing the grandeur of the Kashmir Valley. The character Yog Raj Chitrakar has many faces: explorer, draughtsman, cartographer, valiant conqueror, soldier, prisoner of war, painter, artist, romantic, dandy and queen. These are signified by the elaborate costumes, which are changed throughout performances to indicate the character’s transformation. Yog Raj Chitrakar sets up camp, indoors or outdoors, and makes large scale drawing of what he sees: cities in transition, places at the cusp of change, the collision of history and the present, architecture and nature. The large-scale drawings, as well as the props used in the performance, are left as a remnant, however it is the process that is the most important to the artist, as he states: ‘I want the experience of a work to precede the object and I want the making to be at the centre of it.’  Rebecca Morrild

Nikhil Chopra Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing V, 2008

Jayashree Chakravarty

Born 1956 in India Lives and works in Kolkata, India Jayashree Chakravarty works with a multi-faceted, ambiguous visual language teeming with detail and idiosyncrasies. This visual language is based on personal experience and images from her childhood, from her many travels around the world, and from her school days in India and France. In Untitled 1 (The Evolving Space) from 2009, Chakravarty has created a detailed, painstakingly constructed image. It consists of a number of densely woven layers that whirl dramatically in and out of each other, an effect rather like a tornado raging. The work shows the contours of landscapes and buildings, seemingly casually tossed aside for destruction, intermingling with suggestions of insects and a giant fish. However, the hinted-at fauna would appear to be of the petrified kind; reminiscent of prehistoric beings that once roamed the Earth. Sections of maps and drawings of pathways and roads can also be glimpsed in the work, prompting spectators to seek to orient themselves within the motivic overload. Chakravarty’s work appears to want to refer to a natural disaster, but does not do so in an apocalyptic sense. The animals are reproduced in a graphically stringent, stylised, beautiful manner, while the buildings are tossed up into the air like dice in a game. They are visually appealing, abstract shapes, rather than evidence of a malevolent force at play. Chakravarty borrows her subject matter from nature, cartography, and geology. But in Untitled 1 (The Evolving Space) she might be more accurately said to be exploring a psychological terrain: The landscape of her own mind. The artist’s use of chaotic, layered effects and muted, semi-transparent colours form a non-linear narrative eloquent of her complex consciousness. The work appears to be the product of both conscious and unconscious levels of her mind; layers through which her artistic subjectivity is expressed. Chakravarty’s work explores how human beings and the world can be said to be the result of an accumulation of memories about past events. Her work investigates how everything is determined by past, present, and future; when spectators encounter the work, they should be inspired to make their own mental and physical journey forward or back in time.  Stine Kleis Hansen

Jayashree Chakravarty Untitled 1 (The Evolving Space), 2009

Ravi Agarwal

Born 1958 in New Delhi, India Lives and works in New Delhi, India Ravi Agarwal combines social documentary and environmental activism in his photographs and films. As the founder of the NGO Toxics Link, one of India’s leading environmental, non-profit organisations, the artist’s resistance to ecological and environmental depletion add an urgent element to his films and photographs and becomes a medium in itself for his activism. Emerging in the first flush of India’s booming economy in the 1990s, Ravi Agarwal balances his awareness of globalisation and rapid urban development while also negotiating cultural tradition. Often dedicating years to photograph a project, returning repeatedly to the same area, or travelling with groups of migrant works, Agarwal’s images of the river, street, labour and work provide an incisive socio-political commentary on the so-called informal sector of India's economy. Have you seen the flowers on the river, 2007, a series of 6 photographs and a video produced during an eco-art residency, is a personal and social documentation on New Delhi’s rapidly changing landscape, focusing on the Yamuna Pushta River. Charting the steady demise of the river and the communities sustained by its waters, Agarwal’s photographs trace the journey of the marigold flowers sown on the river bed through a system of exchange that is the basis of livelihood for local communities. As the land becomes precious for its per-acre real estate value, the marigold fields and the people whose lives are inextricably bound to the river are threatened. In the contemporary urban environment, Agarwal’s images lament the reduction of resources; their value is judged on their ‘usefulness’, based on what can be offered both economically and politically. At another level, the river is intimately linked to the cyclical idea of life, death and rebirth, through the narrative of the marigold returning back to the water, which bore it. The video work Machine, 2007, also captures the contradictions inherent in the contemporary urban culture. Agarwal reflects on how the poor are ‘thrown out of their homes in the city and are ferried back in as household labour. Like a relentless machine, ceaselessly going on and on.’ In contrast to the brightly coloured images of the marigold fields, the video of the machine moving in an endless loop of whirs and clicks creates a sense of dislocation and alienation. The absence of human figures stain these images with a sense of regret that comes with uninhibited urban development. In Agarwal’s series of photographs Urbanscapes, 2008, the buildings and spaces that have become marked for demolition are presented in stark contrast to the slick media images of India’s developing cities. Agarwal transforms these ruined structures into areas of hope or as an alternative future by infusing the dark grey interiors with small clippings of pastoral landscapes whether its through the rich reds of the bougainvillea trees or the bright oranges of the marigold fields. More recently, Agarwal’s work has focused on explorations of the self. Shroud, 2007, is a series of twenty-four self-portraits, in which Agarwal is photographed repeatedly at different times of the day by the riverbank, encased in a clear plastic shroud. These images examine his relation to the river not only as a site of exchange and a place of mysticism but also as a lifeline to a city of 15 million people, articulating his desire for unity with both the environment and the self to create a ‘personal ecology.’   Leila Hasham

Ravi Agarwal The Shroud, 2007