Of Maya Machines and Darshan Devtas

ARTWALK

We're India shining. If you listen to the instructions carefully, you'll get a piece of it too. Look around and take in the buoyancy.

Or not. Depends on what you see or see through. In a world where there are supposedly more photographs than bricks, you're probably in great need for a rough guide. Satish Sharma's new body of work, Digital Dreams, is every intelligent person's guide through the contemporary world of images.

Satish's interests lie in the building of the New India. His hypothesis is that images are fundamentally altering our self-perception and reconstructing them in accordance with the kind of consumer that the global market needs to itself consume.

You are simultaneously the fodder and the fed. To show you how, he sets off on Delhi roads, framing what he sees. This show is that evolving India patched together in new-age photographs.

Two ideas are recurrent in his work. First, that you need to actually read the photographs. You can't simply see these images but read the texts they contain. Second, knowledge as power reverberates in each segment.

Nothing holds these themes better than a frame taken off a school bus. A taut yellow-and-blue frame holds the image of a smiling, uniformed, pig-tailed girl gazing at the camera. On one side of her is the insignia of her school: The Indian School. Its motto? Knowledge is Power (Jai Foucault ki).

And the bus, as it advertises itself, is run on CNG "" the clean twin of globally controversial oil. Crunched, this is the new India Satish engages with. In another frame, he fleshes out the new sexuality. Consider a frame from a mallscape.

A vertical frame exclaims: I'm proud I'm me!

A fashionably pretty-faced young man in underpants gazes benignly at the world below. Another board nearby advertises a unisex salon. The two advertisements seem made for each other, even as the large board behind them proclaims: The Times of India. These are indeed the times! These are the very images that Satish interprets for us. They are all over, but few ever see the narrative they contain. That these are not the odd coincidence is clear when he repeatedly offers images from diverse contexts.

Digital Dreams opens out the frames and release the viewer from their grip. The half a dozen sets of images act as doubled triptychs of some kind, each unravelling a tale someone else is telling you.

The camera, Satish reminds us, is a Maya Machine. And today, digital images and their manufacturing are the GM of images, controlling attributes and retransmitting data.

To remind you that the images you're seeing are also subjective, Satish often includes his own shadow shooting that image. And that's the point. All through the show, Satish uses formal languages of red and blue, reinforcing a visual linkage that seems to hold the show together.

Until you realise that this is meticulously planned too. Satish intends for us to see these two colours and then link them with the images of the popular/unpopular soft drink brand names associated with them.

At many levels, Satish offers what he himself calls the "oppositional voice". He is the antidote to retail therapy, offering a way out of the assault by multiple manufactured images that crowd out space to think. The Dristi he offers comprises emptying the mind of images and learning to reassemble the image.