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