Anant Art Gallery isn’t quite the neutral display space it might seem to be. Curator Deeksha Nath’s new show, Immersions, belabours that point with dexterity.
In her own words, Deeksha says, “This exhibition allows artists to think of the gallery space as not just a ‘white cube’ but about the sorts of dialogues that may be generated between the artist, the artwork and the viewing space.” To tease out this active participant in the show — the gallery itself — the artists were allowed to pick up spaces of their choice and create works that set up such tripartite conversations between the art, the gallery and the viewer.
Many of these zones boiled over in exuberance, and some were left with their chemistry turned cold. Nivedita Deshpande stunned with her ephemeral sculpture, suspended from the ceiling, casting shadows that would take on a new life with every viewer who added their own to the walls. In contrast, Archana Hande made a bold, static intervention with her all-in-one shaadi booth. In this bright pink corner space, she offers pleasure accessories, honeymoon guides and aphrodisiacs — all accessible, it seemed, only under the cover of marriage. It was engrossing. But it could have been located anywhere else — the gallery itself seemed to be a quiet actor. Not overpowered, just servile, if not simply indifferent. More complex was Baptist Coelho’s work on private-public spaces. His photographs of a public space in four urban spots — including two highly popular, touristic areas — the Taj and Leh — was set up in long, glass-like cases, accompanied by the ambient sound he had captured. He enclosed the images of such public spaces and their accompanying sounds captured on a disc that necessarily has to be inserted into closed machinery. His own vantage point — above the spaces he shot — also inserted the element of the private within these very public spaces. Coelho, therefore, created a disjuncture between the public and the private, morphing one into the other. He chose to display his work in the middle of the rooms, the intuitive walking areas, away from the art on the walls, private in their own paradoxical way. The final section of this concept comprised a dim-lit room — a bulb suspended in the middle — like interrogation rooms of the state — filled with white paper planes. These were Coelho’s boyhood memories. An immediate tension took over the room, especially if you took the path down the four pictures boxes first, the room itself ejecting its status as shrine. In this sense, the show takes on a dynamic trajectory.
But once set up, Immersions also seemed to interrogate the idea of a fixed role of the curator. Does this exhibition expand wider than the curator had perhaps imagined? And does this create the opportunity for a “dynamic” curatorial role? Could Deeksha have predicted this shift in terrain and prepared for such moulting of herself in this role? We don’t know how she will renegotiate herself in this show. But generating the idea is itself brave and challenging. How — and if — she glides in and out of this will be the post production part we must wait for.