Where in the World

Rani, the cow is a symbol from his rural past. But her slick surface, covered in hot pink at the collector’s request, turns her from nostalgia into pop; it suggests a developing emotional distance that will allow the artist to mine his own past for imagery that is ripe for similar transformations.

Subodh Gupta first used the vocabulary of steel vessels at his solo show at Gallery Chemould, Mumbai, in 1998. The steel works are all about the instant impact of monumentality and sheen.

High Life II transforms Indian middle class utensils into spectacular and magical installations. Outside India, Gupta's chimtas and lotas recall the history, from Warhol onwards, of using mass-produced objects to make art.

Stainless Steel, 81 inches x 83 inches x 25 inches, 2005-6.

Subodh’s work is an observation on bourgeoisie and material culture and it addresses the issues of commodification in this age of globalization.

Outside India, Subodh Gupta's chimtas and lotas recall the history, from Warhol onwards, of using mass-produced objects to make art. The familiarity of Subodh’s art-language might have a role to play in his reputation in the international market.

Fibreglass, metal frame, paper, 60 inch diameter, 2007 (left) & Print on archival paper, 51.1 inches x 35 inches (each), 2005 (right).

Navin Thomas trained as a cinematographer and graphic designer is sensitive to the alterations in the life-style of the work force engaged in the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector.

Automation, voice and accent training and sleeping patterns determined by the call-centre industry prompted Thomas to make a series of photographic and comic strip collages, allegorically deploying parrot beaks and telephone receivers.

In Future Tales of Automation, the parrot beak recurs. The parrot here alludes not to the parrot-storyteller in Indian myths, but to a bird which is able to imitate the sounds that humans make, compulsively and repetitively, without understanding the meaning of the words uttered.

There is nothing that globalization has left un-touched, including the figural imaginations of an Orissan artist, Jagannath Panda. His experiences are stretched from the minutely local to the pervasively global.

 Aluminum & brass, electric wire, 108 inches x 109 inches x 21.5 inches, 2006.

In this metal sculpture by Sudershan Shetty depicting the interaction of two bovine skeletons, one creature lying on his back appears to support a female alter-ego standing above.

Even though the creatures share minimal contact there is intimacy in the representation of love as the reflected self in ‘the other.’ Several of Shetty’s kinetic works are characterized by the use of the skeleton; the exposed framework of the being thus becomes an important signifier.

Oil on Canvas, 48 inches x 48 inches, 2002.

Santhosh works with pictorial ready-mades. Drawing on magazines, television, art history and world cinema for source images, he renders them on immense canvases.Where One Hand Claps/ Signs That Betray Its Meaning is the earlier work, executed when Santhosh was working with images with straightforward historical references.

It is based on a journalistic photograph of sadhus or Indian ascetics captured at the Kumbh Mela. An event like the Kumbh Mela which occurs once in twelve years attracts an international media presence and the images of naga sadhus coming for a holy dip in the sacred river, Ganga, becomes an stereotypical symbol of Hindu spirituality.

Single motor (2RPM) with iron - steel structure, air pump and soap solution, Variable size, 2007.

In this work, Susanta’s machinery is intended to create one bubble that goes through its entire life cycle in a matter of seconds. A mechanical arm drags a pipe through the soapy water and then pushes air through it.

A single bubble forms at the tip. Moments later, another arm brings down a needle to the bubble’s edge. Will the needle burst the bubble? Will the bubble survive?

The unfolding theatre of the bubble’s fate absorbs us, and makes us fear for it.

Death, the River and Me consists of 63 photographs that form a single, coherent narrative. In them, Atul Bhalla is seen on the banks of the Yamuna, marking the river’s death by having his head shaved in a mourning ritual practiced throughout India.

In these images the camera is not static, and the cameraman clearly moves around the place of the ritual, recording the loss of hair. The changing angles of the camera prevent the photographs from being monotonous, and at the same time break the axis of viewing.

By calling this work Sunset in the Valley, Chonat suggests that we are about to see a pleasant sight.

What is on show however, is a canvas depicting cracked, parched earth, which we should connect with the idea of famine, hunger and despair.

Six inverted wooden ploughs are tied together to make the skeleton of a storage house for rice. With no land to till and no rice to harvest, ploughs no longer in use are used to make a memorial that is intended to disturb our willful amnesia.

This work derives from Probir Gupta’s long-term engagement with human rights groups concerned with those who are displaced by development. Rice House reminds us of the forced dislocation, the loss of indigenous knowledge systems, the threat to the agrarian economy, and the deep, pervasive violence that underwrite our modernity and progress.

Every autumn, Kali is worshipped in a popular festival in Bengal, where communities sponsor clay images that will be immersed in water after ten days of worship. There is a multiplicity of ways in which the deity can be imagined. Anita Dube participates in this multiplicity by creating her own representation of the goddess.

For Soap/Lick, Dube stacks a column of seven soap dishes. They are identical, apart from a small protrusion in front that grows progressively larger from top to bottom. This small change is crucial to the work, as this protrusion looks like a tongue, a symbol of Kali.

Mithu Sen’s untitled teeth sculpture brings to mind the myth of vagina dentata or the ‘toothed vagina’. Expressing man’s fear of castration during the act of copulation, this myth warns of the dangers of sex with women.

Confronted with the sculpture, viewers enter a psychological state similar to the fearful men as they watch this female orifice fraught with jagged threats.

Sen uses wit as she takes the ultimate male horror to the point of absolute nightmarish hysteria only to hold it up to the audience as a sculptural frieze. Fear of castration escalates to the level of the impossible, and the fetishization of the fear becomes comical.

Anita Dube made Silence (Blood Wedding) at a time of intense emotional disturbance. She was dealing with a failed relationship and her father was diagnosed with a fatal illness.

Using real human bones as an armature, Dube sheathed them in a skin of deep red velvet and embellished them with beads and lace. Bejewelled, these pieces are effulgent; the objects embody what the artist describes as a ‘deep rejection of death’.

As we take delight in remnants of a dead person unknown to us, the beauty of these objects becomes profoundly disturbing. Bones, upon them, fabric, upon that, beads: the artist piles meaning upon meaning on the same entity.

Latex, iron, human hair, life size, 2004.

Jeetander Ojha’s I Always Remember You shocks us through its graphic rendering of flayed human skin. The figure represented is not only naked and dead, but has been violently shorn of its insides and hung upside down like a carcass in a butcher’s shop.

The artist made this sculpture after his father’s death, in response to the popular practice of framing photographs of the dead on the walls. By hanging up human skin in place of a benign photograph, Ojha compels us to face the reality of death rather than sentimental representations of the ‘deceased’.

Wood, Pvc pipes, glass pots, aluminium tub, tinted water, motor mechanical device, 21.6 inches x 12.7 inches x 64 inches, 2006.

In Shetty’s Eight Corners of the World series, domestic furniture and objects turn into surreal organs leaking blood or milk.

Collected in troughs placed under the cabinets, the liquids are pumped back to rejoin the endless, gushing, gurgling torrent.

If we keep the pump switched off in this work, it will no longer be the artwork that Shetty intended. If we keep it running, this cabinet will gradually degenerate and stop functioning as it wears itself away.

Steel structure with glass bottle, soap solution, air-pump, timer, black granite, 26 inches x 20 inches x 9 inches - 18 inches (each), 2007.

Susanta Mandal uses soap solution and an electric motor to make bubble ‘sculptures’ that form and burst in a continual reinvention of themselves. In his words, he ‘explores the play of structured, static forms with the ephemeral and fragile’.

Wooden base, incense stick, 18 inches x 16 inches, 2006.

This sculpture is one of a series that Nicola Durvasula made as homages and reprisals of modernist masterpieces. Kinetic Sculpture remakes Naum Gabo’s work, Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave) (1919-20).

Durvasula’s sculpture replaces the upright metal rod with the consumable, ephemeral and culturally marked agarbatti or incense stick.

Stainless steel and fibreglass, 83 inches x 199 inches x 104 inches (Dinosaur) & 49 inches x 169 inches x 59 inches (Jaguar), 2006.

In this installation, Shetty makes clever use of two iconic symbols: the fibreglass cast of a 1972 Jaguar car which is the symbol of luxury, and a relic from the past, a dinosaur, made of steel plates.