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