Nehru, Nobel and display criteria

What do Jawaharlal Nehru and Alfred Nobel have in common, I wondered, as I stumbled upon the traveling exhibition The Nobel Prize: Ideas Changing the World, on view as a temporary exhibit at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, located in the heart of the city. Both were iconic figures who left a lasting legacy that has redefined our knowledge of history and the ways we choose to "read" it today. Surrounded by much controversy and fanfare, both are remembered and memorialised in very different ways.

Located at the corner of Teen Murti Marg, one enters the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library through the gate to the Planetarium, past a 14th century hunting lodge belonging to the Delhi Sultanate ruler Firoz Shah Tughlaq, finally leading to the sprawling lawns surrounding the former residence and now memorial museum of Jawaharlal Nehru. As I walked in, I was struck by the many timelines of existence: past, present and future, all collapsed into a moment of experience and a site.

Museums were developed to preserve material culture associated with a civilisation, person or event. Memorials and monuments have been built for centuries in the hope of attaining glory and immortality for the persona being memorialised. Re-tracking back to the "frame" of the Nehru Museum, the idea to preserve and foster the history of India's independence through the figure of one of its leaders isn't new, and is not wholly comprehensive. The Nobel Museum, on the other hand, commemorates Alfred Nobel's wish to foster and award innovation in fields he appreciated — physics, chemistry, literature, peace and medicine. Call it philanthropy or a way to redeem himself from a then-notorious reputation as the inventor of dynamite. His name perpetuates because of the one will and wish that ensured universal approval and his continued veneration thereof. While in concept, both museums rely on the personalities from which they derive their name and inspiration, the difference between the two lies in the outlook: NMML looks retrospectively, while the Nobel Museum looks at the "now" and the future.

I find it pertinent to observe what is let in and what is left out. Criteria for inclusion have always played politics in the writing of history and in the collective memory of the public. 

In room after room of the NMML, I see Nehru family albums, documentary photographs of socio-political events that are regarded as critical historical moments and newspaper clippings recording the same. Constructed genealogies of movements are displayed on the wood-panelled walls of the building. Each reveals its own history – recorded in the architecture, the construction, the use, the contents, the customs of visitation and the public's perception.

The Nobel Prize: Ideas Changing the World exhibition is located on the first floor and balcony of the building, somewhat in the middle of India's history of the Satyagraha movement, leading to "Gandhi as Rebel". It is divided into the following sub-categories — "The Nobel Prize and its Inception", "The Prize over the Decades", "The Prize in Everyday Life" and "The Prize in the Future". The first chapter is illustrated with a selection of three winning innovations in each of the five fields, as well as Nobel's own counterpart. For example, in the vitrine for the field of medicine, Nobel's transfusion device is placed alongside Robert Bárány's vestibular apparatus (1915) and Shinya Yamanaka's model of reprogrammed mature cells (2012). The second chapter is illustrated with edited videos clips, marking "defining" events in history — the fall of the Berlin Wall for the decade 1981-'90, the widespread use of the transistor radio in the 1950s, the founding of the Red Cross in the 1920s. The third chapter is an extension of the first two, with a description of how Nobel laureates' innovations affect us. The last chapter is an interactive poll asking the visitors questions about their views on disarmament of nuclear weapons, on climate change and the use of natural resources, medical research and ways of increasing human longevity as well as the importance of storytelling in an age of digital media.

So what does my argument have to do with art per se? Well, for one, I think it is important to note the manner in which we understand museums and the personalities behind each exhibition. It also brings to the fore the reasons and methods behind selection and collecting for display. With private museums in India playing a dynamic role in facilitating new ways of representation and a platform for initiation of open dialogue, I find it increasingly pertinent to observe what is let in and what is left out. Criteria for inclusion have always played politics in the writing of history and in the collective memory of the public. How far are museums and their intent derived from the biographies of their founding personalities, and to what extent have new mutations been formed by presenting certain documents and achievements within the elevated frame of artifacts for museum display?

The exhibition was fittingly inaugurated by Nobel laureates A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Kailash Satyarthi and George Smoot, and remains on view at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library till 11 December.

The short story art of Arpita Singh

Other Narratives/ Other Structures: Selected works by Arpita Singh, on view at the Lalit Kala Akademi, is well worth one visit, if not more. Hosted in collaboration with Vadehra Art Gallery and curated by Ella Dutta, the exhibition features works from private collections dating back to the 1970s. Opening with brief introductions of both the artist and the curator, a timeline of landmark moments guides the viewer through political events and personal happenings in Singh's life that visibly resonate in her work.

These and whatever she draws from miniature painting traditions, mythologies, textiles, folk art and art history make for a rather extensive art vocabulary that is well articulated in triptychs like The Lily Pond, From Time to Time and Whatever is Here. 

Born in the late 1930s, Arpita Singh has witnessed many events that affected her geopolitical surroundings, most profound of which were widespread human displacements. The theme of migration has been recurrent in her work, although she assigns this to her interest in ancient history and the transmission of languages, micro cultures, values and codes of conduct, whether filtered through generations or carried by those seeking new habitats.

Munna Apa's Garden, Oil on canvas ,62.2" x 68.3", 1989

My Lily Pond, Oil on canvas, 2009

What struck me upon entering the exhibition space were the sheer number of works and vibrancy of colour. Singh's art is recognisable for its strong emotional quotient, repetition of motifs, use of letters and numbers that are often stenciled, and incessant mappings. These and whatever she draws from miniature painting traditions, mythologies, textiles, folk art and art history make for a rather extensive art vocabulary that is well articulated in triptychs like The Lily Pond, From Time to Time and Whatever is Here. While the first, inspired by a newspaper headline rehashes Monet's charming lilies into an episode of turmoil as a way of resisting turning the world into Guantanamo Bay, Whatever is Here, inspired by the Mahabharata, is a chart of real and imagined landscapes, plotted with figures and loaded with suggestions of moral duty. Singh also strongly identifies with her feminine side and the domestic roles she performs thereof. This is particularly noticeable in works like Munna Apa's Garden, while others like Buy Two, Get Two Free is also a comment on the effects of growing consumerism.

Often described as being dream-like compositions, I see her works as multi-layered, in terms of both painted technique as well as subject material. The tact with which she handles her subjects reflects a universality that negates restrictions of temporality. Her watercolours are more poignant and sombre, her oils thick and harder-hitting, and her etchings and sketches lean toward abstraction. She is nevertheless, a narrative painter. If I were to read the titles of her works, I'd imagine them to be short stories — The Listeners, The Golden Deer, The Winter Walk or The Cornflower Bed. And strangely enough, each reads as though it were so.

The exhibition unfolds as a compilation of the artist's work through five decades with a few early pieces — still evolving into the art language we know as hers, and some others having never been publically displayed. It is a mélange of diverse elements, just as each of Arpita Singh's painted surfaces is, and is thus, a unique treat for the senses.

Moudled to perfection

I've always wondered why ceramic art has not been promoted, or at least viewed with more respect. Its inability to outgrow the label of simply being moulded and fired clay, and therefore humbler than other glitzy crafts, has in my opinion, encouraged an indifferent attitude resulting in people losing out on the subliminal beauty that the medium can represent. Having said this, who today dare contest a medium anyway, especially amongst all we brand as "contemporary art", for categories of new materials like those found, recycled or even virtual have only recently entered art vernacular.

Considering the earliest forms of art were etched in stone or made of clay, we of course, do not do the ceramist or his medium justice. So, I made my way to see the solo exhibition of Hyderabad-based ceramic artist P.R. Daroz at Art Alive Gallery that coincidentally followed Pondicherry-based Ray Meeker's recent exhibit at Nature Morte. Daroz's show comprises the artist's more recent body of work, executed over the last four years. At first, there were guardians to greet me; a series of block figures standing on pop coloured wooden pedestals in a grouping of three. With bodies of shaded ceramic that revealed markings in thin verticals and bold diagnals, their faces shone in a goldish hue. A similar palette was used for all other works with a progressive departure toward glossiness.

All Daroz's murals are executed as mosaics in grids, some with Buddha-like faces and others wholly abstract. He plays off the sheer materiality of the medium: texturing, layering, sculpting and colouring. Daroz is a prolific sculptor, who has been commissioned by commercial offices and hotel groups to adorn their walls with decorative ceramic murals. Perhaps this is because his work is not loaded with political commentary, nor is provocative. It is secular, pleasant and simple.

As I walk through the last room of the exhibit, the metallic foil-like glazes shine at me, revealing the artifice of the surface. The crude clay was transformed for the benefit of its viewer and patron into a glossy, admirable material. Yet, it reveals a primal quality, like that of an excavated fossil, a historical relic for whom time and contemporaneity are not significant. It exists as it always has, moulded, tempered, glazed or unglazed.

Wherever I lay my hat, is that what I call home?

Home: Residence/ Dwelling/ Safe house/ Place of love and warmth, of duties and responsibilities. How far do we stray from home and do we ever come back?

Veteran photographer Sunil Gupta's new curatorial project titled Home & Away brings together the work of nine Indian and international photographers, including his own. The selection of photographs reflects each artist's personal vision of home, or their memory of it. The introductory text ends such — "Without a deliberate bias, it's interesting that the women are looking inwards to a domestic environment and the men are on the outside; either away or strangers in their own homes." This strain runs through my head as I view the photographs, consciously taking note of the gender of the photographer behind each image and this for me, sets the tone of the show.

The exhibition opens with the work of Portuguese Pedro Maçãs. His black and white photographs of dissolute construction sites are from the series "The storm that bends the birch trees", drawn from a poem by Bertolt Brecht on violence that metaphorically exposes many of the half-way abandoned housing projects in an economically struggling Portugal. On the opposite wall, equally large and imposing are images taken on the streets of New Delhi and New York titled Catskills, by Rishi Singhal, who charts the awkward relationship between natural and built environments. Both artists are preoccupied with documenting the changing urban landscape yet while Maçãs looks inside its architecture, Singhal explores the fringes outside. Placed on a table in the corner is a box of cards called Querencias by Dinesh Abiram, a medley of text and image that hold personal memories reflecting the manner in which a person affects his habitat.

An adjacent room is devoted to Gupta's fourteen prints from Stockwell, 2014. The series responds to the frequently asked question as to where Gupta comes from; to which he replies, "I am from India, but now live on Stockwell". The photographs are a narrative of his musings, of everyday observations of life in Stockwell — the corner of a building, a ramshackle garage door, a neon road sign or a decorated window display. 

Without a deliberate bias, it’s interesting that the women are looking inwards to a domestic environment and the men are on the outside; either away or strangers in their own homes.

Anusha Yadav's Home, An Irrevocable Condition poetically expresses how the home is a reflection of the woman who resides in it. Each image is accompanied by a biographical note of the woman photographed in the "comfort of her own home". Along a similar thread of domesticity are Deborah Lorraine Grant's more emotionally charged 28 Days, 28 Dinners. Suffering from chronic pain, the work documents each of the 28 dinners she cooked for her husband, accompanied here too with autobiographical entries on how and what was cooked, why she decided to order take-out or sometimes never eat at all. 

Anna Fox, 41 Hewitt Road

Sunil Gupta, Stockwell series

Charan Singh, Not at home

Charan Singh’s Not At Home series questions male stereotypes

Continuing on the first floor is Charan Singh's Not at Home that alternatively questions male domesticity amidst social stereotypes of masculinity and heroism. He chooses to photograph himself within familial settings in the landscape of his home, ironically telling of what comes across as obviously awkward and forced. There could not have been a more apt title!

A further renewal of family album photography is invigorated in the accordion styled book of memories, Native Place by Aditi Thekkuveettil, who belongs to parents of mixed parentage and wondered which she was more of. Beside this, is a series of ugly close-ups of a communal home in Northern London where Anna Fox grew up. A stained wall, a chipped marble counter, a child's drawing, an assemblage of junk food and candy wrappers — relics of those who lived in 40 Hewit Road (1996-99), each a document of memory, each wanting to be forgotten.

The sequence in which Gupta has chosen to exhibit each artist's work echoes a sense of "being led" from the outside to the inside, from a landscape to a mindscape and thereby, to a deeper understanding of emotions and relationships. By ending with the work of Fox, Gupta cleverly provokes the viewer to question the idea of home and wherein it lies! The exhibition is amongst the better I've seen in Delhi over the past few months and well worth the visit.