For a Fresh Gallery Space, Contemporary Indian Art

Disquieting similarities

Jaishri Abichandani, born in Bombay, educated in London and living in New York, is a recognised and much travelled artist. Her personal story reflects the broader situation amid the globalising processes where different cultures overlap both tentatively and essentially to reveal similarities and connections underneath their diversities and clashes. Significantly titled "Reconciliations", her exhibition at Sumukha (December 13 to 30), indeed, deals with this phenomenon and its impact on the human mind, emotions and conscience. The youngish artist, who is an activist in feminist and political issues, combines in her work a number of approaches, media and aims wishing, on the one hand, to touch on many aspects of things and, on the other, to stimulate a disrupted yet holistic, and so engaged, response in the spectator. In a manner that conjures an environment, she collects and juxtaposes photography, sculpture and video, while in an equal measure but in different ways relying on their visual effectiveness, intellectual recognition and sensation.

The main part of the display, literally as well as metaphorically, takes a vast perspective on the world as one composite city. At first glance, the large, uniform-size photographic images appear like conventionally attractive but somewhat indifferent views of urban spreads usually framed by hilly landscapes, often mirrored in water. They simultaneously look different and the same to remind of the superimposing and blending memories of several places in a frequent flier on business and pleasure. The density of their architecture conveys much energy, both positive and disquieting that enhances but also weakens or turns vulnerable against the natural expanse. A while, one begins to feel that there is something strange in the tourist brochure-like sceneries which suggest indistinctly a kind of smoothly repaired seam condition, as if excessive elements - buildings and roads - were crowded together sporadically hinting at illogic. As one tries to probe them from close-on, the digital blur prevents it. In fact, it may not be possible to read their specific content without the titles and the artist's explanations. What one senses as comparisons and permeability between alien yet similar cities - areas of commercial force and glamour hiding violence, of human ingenuity in poverty, of wreckage resulting from war, is referred to by Abichandani to history and the history of culture, social and political conditions.

The artist assumes the importance of her concept leading the viewer, this often being successful, sometimes however without conjuring adequate clarity or intensity of impact. Throughout these images of our connectivity and vital oneness, gravity mingles with humour, warmth with sarcasm. If the architectural crowding of the photographic cities mostly omits figures of people but evokes loneliness, the video work about a Pakistani drag queen brings it out on an intimate level.