An Alternative Contemporary, Sunaparanta Centre for the Arts, Goa

An Alternative Contemporary - a celebration of contemporary miniature art.  The exhibition Showcased the evolution of Indian miniature painting and its influence on contemporary artists. Curated by Waswo X. Waswo, telling us how various artists are preserving and re-imagining the art form through innovative narratives and experimentation with the form through video and other media. 

Waseem Ahmed 

I’ve always been fascinated by miniature paintings. I recall copying them from prints one could buy at Lalit Kala Academy in the 1970’s . I absolutely loved the detailed brushwork as also the stylistic rendering of perspective, trees, dress and people. In the early 1980’s I even embarked on a cross-stitch embroidery based on a well recognised miniature. I worked on it for a year, but never got around to finishing it. I still have the unfinished piece and marvel at the very idea of undertaking such fine embroidery. But, it’s the details that I do love, whatever the form or media.

Vinita Sharma 

Monique Romeiko and Vagaram Choudhary 

totally transformed the miniature format. It was wild, creative and technically a feat to have created an artwork where the painting is static but people within it moved about doing yogic postures and other activities. The people are dressed in contemporary dress, in total contrast to the painted style. It was perhaps the most innovative work in the show 

At the far end of Sunaparanta, below the main building, was a small but delightful Gallery tucked away round the back, which showcased the Company Style of Indian Miniature paintings, but with a difference. The paintings  were framed by mounts painted with monochromatic patterns in gold  on cream background, drawing from ancient textiles and spices - re-invoking the legendary spice Trade that was traded not in currency but with India’s famed textiles. They reminded me of the monochromatic colchas that Portuguese officials commissioned as gifts and for private trade. 

The room itself was sheer magic with chairs, sofas, windows, a chaise lounge, chandelier and floor standing candelabra, drawn to perfection in black charcoal on the walls of the gallery. The chair and table beside it, in particular were so realistic that I kept trying to put my glass of wine on it, to free my hands to take a picture. If anything detracted from that charming exposition, it was the gold painted patterns on the mounts that lacked the finesse of brush that painted the miniatures they framed. These works were a collaboration between eight artists. Tulsi Nimbarak, Ghanshyam (chotu), Pawan, Raju Sharma, Sridhar , Kailashchand, Siddharth Gosavi  and Dr. Seema Bhalla 

Alongside the video by Romeiko and Choudhary, was a video by  Eeman Masood literally re-inventing the miniature painting in a digital format. Rendered in true miniature style, the colours and medium transformed the traditional art form. It’s worth the minute watch, as Masood explores dreamlike qualities of a forest painted like a miniature, highlighting the spiritual aspects of miniature painting - where attention to detail and perfection of strokes in minute forms, evoked the very spirit of creation. 

Almost akin to the magnificent formation of many creatures we find in the natural habitat of Goa. These days it’s the blue, brown and red dragonflies that charm : how nature has crafted them so small, so intricate, so perfect. Recently, I spied a couple mating as they hovered over the pool as I swam - floating on the aquamarine waters, mesmerised by natures craftsmanship 

I missed the works from Waswo’s own studio, but he said that when curators include their work it reeks of self-promotion, so they decided not to participate in the main exhibition but painted the walls of the cafe, which is a covered courtyard. Here, he’s posing beside his painted image in the Angan. 

Piyush Sharma 

Vinita Sharma, Piyush Sharma, Olivia Fraser, Waseem Ahmed and Manisha Gera-Baswani among others are also part of the exhibition and it was an eye-opener to see the range of work that is being created. 

Olivia Fraser 

Mahaveer Swami paints the contemporary woman, her gaze ever-so seductive in a nivi-style draped saree. Something one hasn’t seen before in the traditional miniature format. 

Mahaveer Swami 

In Jignasha Ojha’s depiction of modern buildings, one finds a petite woman in a ghaghra down at the right hand corner of the works, tugging at the delicate strings “of all she owns in her home”. As it’s the woman who is attached to everything in the house that she’s made a home with. Taking them with her wherever she goes. Jignasha shared her own attachment to such things and was devastated yet also fascinated that contrary to her imagination there was a woman standing before her art, who had no sentimental value attached to anything in her home. That I had sold almost everything in my Gurgaon home before moving to Goa and hadn’t missed a thing. I remember looking at the emptied apartment and sensing how complete it looked empty as it did before, when it was a lived space, furnished with my stuff! 

Jignasha Ojha 

 Ekta Singha interprets of layers of experiences with design motifs and other elements derived from Mughal, Persian and Rajput miniature paintings, evolving a contemporary vocabulary for the form  on surfaces that are painted with metaphorical and personal references to miniature paintings.  

Ekta Singha 

The circular plaques with unevenly placed floral borders which are fading, broken and disfigured in parts, frame delicately painted forms like a broken fragments of a tea-cup, a woman with a long braid being pulled by unseen hands, a beetle-nut cracker and other such quirky images outlined in a dull tone of crimson, placed in a discreet curve of the plague, drawing one’s attention to their significance. 

Ekta Singha 

I was, of course, drawn into the broken cup, looking for the tea that was spilt, the stains it created, but it was bone dry. Without the memories of hundreds of pints of tea one has drunk through the mornings of living, without evoking the energy of stains. Just something so barren, so stoic in its brokenness. 

Ekta Singha 

Alexander Gorlizki’s work seemed to reference some elements that we’ve seen in Waswo’s own work, particularly the inclusion of western elements like a Beetle Volkswagen trailing a horse, a man dressed in jodhpurs blowing a bugle, an astronaut pushing a pram and a rotund gentleman replete with top hat and breeches riding a massive seagull. However, Waswo informed me that Gorlizki had been here long before Waswo, as his mother was a buyer from the US, so he frequented India a lot, was familiar with her culture and ideas such that aged eighteen he created a sculpture with Mahatma Gandhi’s trademark round spectacles. Which “was quite precocious” 

Alexander Gorlizki 

Alexander Gorlizki 

All in all, a really refreshing experience. If you haven’t been to see it yet. Do go see the show 

Unfinished embroidery (cross-stitch) based on miniature painting. (NOT IN EXHIBITION) 

It Is But A Matter of Course……Isn’t It?

'Sensorium' - the end is only the beginning, was a multi-gallery presentation at Sunaparanta Centre for the Arts, a non-profit arts initiative founded by Dipti and Duttaraj Salgaonkar. Sometimes, Viewing art can be akin to a pilgrimage, and this exhibition certainly took me into deeper reaches of one’s existence and beyond.

 

Dhruvi Acharya

 

The last time I’d visited the centre was months ago and I had never driven there before. As luck would have it my maiden attempt was confusing and disorienting because the Jio Wi-Fi dongle acted up. And when I did have signal, google map was confused by the on and off signals such that I was taken on a long and needlessly winding route. When I finally got there, the painted blue and white  facade was indeed a welcoming sight. Located atop Altinho Hill, Sunaparanta overlooks the city of Panjim and you can also catch a glimpse of the Mandovi River. The arts centre is housed in a large Portuguese-style villa with lush foliage and flowers overhanging the entrance and courtyard. As a venue for compositions pontificating the concept of that which doesn’t have an end, but is just another beginning, this colonial bungalow showcasing contemporary art, was an apt location, in more ways than one.

Art work Jacob Fellander - Bodega Cafe

 

After seeing some of the art,  sipping a cup of Earl Grey tea at the Bodega Cafe housed in the inner courtyard,  I mulling over the works seen,  I couldn’t help but notice how alluring Dhruvi Archarya’s, canvases, expressive of her inimitable wry humour, appeared, when framed by green Areca fronds in the foreground, and bordered by the undulating edge of a traditional, Khaprael-tiled, darkened terracotta roof above. Desmond Lazaro’s polaroidic images, musing on family and personal history, glanced over my shoulder as I relished a slice of carrot cake, as if nudging me to talk about my own.  Standing up to take a closer peek at the framed images, shadow-like lines of the courtyard and it’s various surfaces were reflected on the glass. It made for a rather pleasing juxtaposition, however unintended this may have been.

 

Desmond Lazaro

 

In the gardens, at the entrance to the centre, Riyas Komu had constructed an ode to his father’s balcony in Thrissur. Chancing upon this oddly styled sculpture-installation at the very start was bewildering. It was only after I’d seen the rest of the works that,  I was able better to appreciate its facets . Seen from different angles it took on varied shapes, where the contours got distorted or enhanced. Although the artists intent was to enable spectators to experience their immediate surroundings through an altered perspective by climbing up onto this  “ideological balcony”, I was more fascinated by walking around and noting how the model was re-crafted from each observed point. Created with metal and recycled wood the isolated balcony seemed to stand on its own. The structure that surrounded it and from which it rose above, was a crudely built house-like façade with a nave raised at one end and dropped at the other. This edifice used simple, monopoly-type house,  ‘building’ blocks. Rusted metal crosses also made their appearance within this house of houses. All in all, it conjured a most curious tribute to a parent who was cited as a strong influence. It was when I stood at the end closest to the bungalow (farthest from the entrance gate), where the nave was laid on the floor, and thought how it resembled a quirky ‘Noah’s Ark’ that, I got a sense of Komu’s relationship with his father and of his fathers’ relationship with the world: an embracing refuge, yet not built on this external validation, but standing on his own - powered by a potent inner self.

 

Riyas Komu, My Father's Balcony

 

My reading of this visage as a could-be Noah’s Ark, may well have been suggested by Gigi Scaria’s video ‘The Ark’. In this 3 minute,  single channel black and white projection, Gigi takes us back to the biblical myth as “an abode of continuity in a terrain of utter destruction”. Shown on a relatively small screen,  one was compelled to peer closely at the moving images watching a primitive, wooden,  luggage-carousel-like-contraption, leaving the ark-ship which stands marooned on cracked, dry mud. This moving bridge enters a large chamber that’s spewing grey smoke. It struck me almost instantly as an asphyxiating gas chamber, evocative of what our polluted cities are becoming. I could only discern luggage as passing from the ark into this threatening space - were there no people, I wondered. And then, what’s the continuum?  But, perhaps the artist suggests,  that carrying forth untended emotional baggage, this is where mankind is headed - the end of the world as an envisioned reality? While using Noah’s Ark as a symbol of continuity (that life on the planet survived the engulfing deluge thanks to the rule that only two pairs of each kind could enter, to procreate and ensure continuity of their species), Scaria also refutes the impression that the end is a new beginning. He doesn’t see a continuance to the Ark and its implied notion of survival. Gagging with toxins, breathing the poisonous air of a crowded metropolis, it’s probably too difficult to imagine one.

 

Gigi Scaria - video still

 

Numerous interesting  works were on display, making untold demands on the viewing eye: Michael Muller from Berlin, Juul Kraijer from Holland, Julien Segard from France and Jacob Fellander and Pers-Anders Pettersson from Sweden, Iftikar Dadi from Pakistan in collaboration with Elizabeth Dadi from USA, Munem Wasif of Bangladesh, along with Belgium-born Srilanka-based artist Saskia Pintelon, made up the international quorum, while Indian artists from Jammu to Kerala, Tamilnadu and Bengal presented their work.

 

Saskia Pintelon

 

Reminding us of how mindlessly traditions are can be carried forth, Saskia Pintelon’s ‘Faces’ were inspired by matrimonial adverts in Sri Lankan newspapers. In series of collages with obliterated faces, (using smileys or empty egg-shells and other such interventions), she reworks old photographs (studio portraits), highlighting marital discord and the naivety of traditional choices. Above all, her comment resonates with the fact that traditions are kept in continuance, often without understanding the merit they were devised upon or for, or their relevance in contemporary times.

 

Shreyas Kale, Ascending Descending and 5mm

 

Minimal, precise and incisive, Shreyas Karle subverts norms of perception. The two mirrored brass stairways of ‘Ascending Descending’ was quirky but it was the two brass pipes entitled '5mm' that compelled me delve deeper. What were those two parallel pipes depicting? If the simply presented visual hadn’t  commanded attention, one could have missed the whole point. Intrigued by it, I glanced through the accompanying text and learned that the pipes were once of equal length, but one of the pipes had been cut into 6 parts and re-joined, which altered its size. The change is minimal and barely noted and the entire premise of cutting a pipe, joining it and placing the uncut and cut-and-joined bits, one above the other, seems almost absurd. But such works take art beyond that of visual delight, bringing into play psychological implications of parity versus identity and how a simple thought can alter this. At the physical level it’s an insignificant change. But, in an emotional capacity, and thereby the mental realm, what are the ramifications? How will this impact entities which once belonged as a whole or homogenous group, are separated by lines of caste, creed, religion, and then brought together as a single entity again? A seemingly banal play of ideas stimulates thought and debate.

 

In a similarly abstracted and quixotic mould was Jitish Kallat’s ‘Rain Studies’. A unusual group of black and white drawings, denote ‘rain’ notations made by the artist when he stepped outside, during seasonal showers; holding the drawing paper skyward, turning them into unusual receptacles of rainwater. By virtue of the patterns formed on them by descending raindrops , these graphite and acrylic epoxy presentations on Arches paper become suggestive of planetary constellations. I’m uncertain of whether the undertaking was purely accidental and based on rainwater impacting drawings already done on graphite, if there’s a happy marriage of happenstance controlled by imaginative meanderings and how much of each is deliberately orchestrated, if at all. The initiative intrigues and highlights the potential of artistic endeavour to open up possibilities and creatively address issues of life, death, continuance. Where it is said to have all started with an astronomical explosion, by invoking the astronomical through the atmospheric, Kallat reminds us how energy destructed to recreate, paving the way for life as we know it. Suggesting that existing is but a ‘matter of course’, even if form and matter are reconstructed and re-formed, that the continuance lies in the life-force flowing into one altered form and the next. Thus revisioning age-old philosophies about past lives and reincarnation.

 

Parul Thacker, a detail

 

There were many other presentations ranging from the very personal to political as well as abstract thought. Parul Thacker’s ‘We Penetrate Deeper And Deeper into the Heart of Darkness’, was fabulously tactile and tempting to touch. Yet too chaotic and intimidating in its hard edges, to endear. Exploring notions of eternal existence, through enmeshed monofilament fibres, raw cotton and phalanx-like, white stalactite crystals, a plethora of hardened crystal formed into  phalluses  of light, protruding horizontally from within the disordered depths of ‘symbolic chaos’, to suggest  a continued existence through procreation. A simple, well-heeled opinion, most commonly held, was presented through the deeper, more abstract dimension of light - as the infallible, age-old wisdom of life.

 

Julien Segard

 

In his multimedia installation, ‘As He Takes From You,  I Engraft You New’, Julien Segard touches on the codes of death and resurrection. He uses left-overs and fallen leaves along with plastic and other stuff that’s washed ashore. All of which he has picked up from a scrapyard in Panjim, and while walking the streets and shores of Goa. Delicately strung mobiles depicting skull bones and vertebrae among his other collected finds; hanging from the high ceiling of the dimly, but srategically lit ‘Library’ of the Centre, its not the engrafting of ‘new’ that shines through, but the concept of death is subtly reframed. From that which is traditionally enveloped by ghosts of despair, to an eerily playful event that, all which is born must face. The presentation is child-like and charming, belying the weightiness of a profound and philosophical theme.

 

Carrying forward the haunted melody through surrealist photographs, Juul Kraijer suggests alternatives to conventional seeing. Two hands, laying one on top of each other, wearing netted gloves, don’t let you ponder on the beauty of those slender fingers, the quality or craftsmanship of the fabric. But, the gaze penetrates the physicality of form imaged, to fathom another, unstated, but decipherable dimension. It’s as if an underlying essence is being unmasked through tonal gradations, which emerge through a unique  process employed by the artist. What you see, isn’t all there is to be seen. An invisible presence is felt. Placing her subjects under a cloak of darkness lends her images this sublime sense of unease which emanates from that which her subject experiences in the dimmed environment – not able to see, not able to centre, knowing she is being watched. Seemingly alone, she is not. And then, neither is the viewer, for the impression of what is perceived renders the perceiver self-conscious.

 

Niyati Unnikrishnan - The Cake

 

Exploring another dimension of the seen and the apparent is Niyati Unnikrishnan of Kerala. Tapping into a vibrant inner world, he presents fictional landscapes with the complexities that emerge in his engagement with current affairs, literature, art and the lives of the people he is acquainted with. In ‘Cake’ he brings together, sunbathing women, half-clad sadhus, yoga practitioners and socialites as part of the cake. They are seated on top, within its layers and in the surrounding scape. the soft contours of watercolour, pencil and ink on paper blur the edges of a satirical comment on the self and its counterparts in the external world. Where does it begin and end – who is who and what is what. Is it a cake or is it not? And is it the world we know, or is it not, or just an imagined space in the artist’s mind? The myriad questions that emerge, from observing this engaging dialogue of the inner and outer worlds with its apparently recognisable, figurative dimensions, lead into one’s own inner-scape.

 

Bodega Cafe - Desmond Lazaro on right.
 Kaushik Chakravarty, behind, in the adjoining room

 

The Sunaparanta Centre is a small and intimate viewing space. And each of the works were housed in what were once,  rooms of sleep and leisure in someone’s home. Walking from one to the next, the arched windows and wooden beams leaning in with their own resonances, examining art that was as disparate as the works curated in ‘Sensorium’, can be a distracting affair. The thematic content was so variously presented that it wasn’t always easy to comprehend what each said, and while this certainly brought to light the continuity of diversity, it also compelled a reference to an inner self.

 

Reena Saini Kallat 
Hyphenated Lives, Tri-khor

 

In ‘Hyphenated Lives’, Reena Saini Kallat added a series of  question marks, semicolons, colons, commas and in a contiguous dialogue.  Resembling zoological or botanical drawings of hybrid creatures that are formed through different species, enjoining to create a variegated kind. (Which our world may well have known, had it not been for Noah’s wisdom of two of each). Reena Kallat created curious hybrids primarily using the national symbols of each country, rendering overtones of political reconciliations that could be compelled into being. At the base the quasi botanical drawing, also reminiscent of a postal stamp, of ‘Rosila’ – a cross-breed  between a rose and dahlia, she writes in cursive hand informing the type as part rose,  wherein “the rose is a woody perennial of the genus Rosa within the family Rosaceae. Its name comes from  the Latin word Rosa. A symbol of love and beauty (as well as war and politics) the world over, the rose was designated the official flower and floral emblem of the United State of America in 1986.” She feels that, instead of uniting people from a region, such symbols have become contentious and reason for monopoly, with the original significance being overshadowed. She pairs the rose with the Dalhia, which draws its name from the Swedish botanist Anders Dahl and has been the national flower of Mexico since 1963. Will this genealogical marriage between the universal symbol of love and the “busy, tuberous, herbaceous and  perennial” Dahlia, espoused by its contentious neighbour, augur well for the future of human relations? Will the ‘Sun-poe’ formed of the Palestinian sunbird and Israeli Hoopoe become an ambassador of peace between two embattled nations. And will the Ti-Khor fused of the Tiger of India and Markhor of Pakistan re-unite a people so bitterly partitioned – the price paid for independence from colonial masters? These interrogations ruminate as the eye takes in the unusual forms these amalgams have birth into.

 

Reena Saini Kallat 
Hyphenated Lives, Rosila

 

A broken glass will always show its cracked joint and cut pipe ends will never quite weld to be the same length. They can exist as an extension of what once was but there is no turning back. I came away with from this presentation of many voices, humming in unison yet singing in  parts, concluding that the continuum of all which is sensory in this world, must mean that whatever the future of the world, whatever form it may or may not take; whether procreation is of same species, or hyphenated in contrived combinations, it is the same energy that breathes that itself into matter formed, re-formed or deformed. Varied and differing in facets of being, but each perfect to its aim.