The V&A’s exhibition at the NGMA is hopefully the first of many more.
If art photography brings to your mind the image of a work, say, by Henri Cartier-Bresson or Raghu Rai, then you’ll have trouble recognising Andy Lock’s ‘Untitled’ as a photograph.
It’s a spare image of an empty bed with its sheet a little rumpled; dark — almost black — with the only light being a lurid green glow coming from the uncurtained window. This would seem trivial to most viewers but the British artist invests his work with a complicated technique that speaks of a carefully considered response to photographic technology, its history and its relation with the object it captures. Lock projected his images — abandoned furniture were the leitmotif of works from the Orchard Park series, to which this one belongs — on painted phosphorescent surfaces, and then photographed them again as they began to fade, achieving a quality of luminescent graininess.
Other works at “Something That I’ll Never Really See”, a travelling show of contemporary British photographs from the Victoria and Albert Museum collection which opened this week at the Capital’s National Gallery of Modern Art, have a similarly divergent relation with the notion of photography as “slice of reality”. There are the surreal shapes of Olga Chernysheva’s “Fishermen Plants” — photographs of Russian fishermen wrapped in plastic to keep out the bitter cold; Chris McCaw’s ‘Sunburn’ which looks like a needle on clear glass, but is actually the effect of sunlight scorching the negative; or Huang Yun’s painted faces.
Of course, conceptual photography is being explored by many artists in India as well, including such established artists as Rameshwar Broota. But it is, nevertheless, interesting to see the developments in the area in the West. The exhibition highlights other trends too in fashion photography, in portraiture and landscapes, with the works of such acclaimed artists as Tim Walker, Nan Golding, Stephen Gill, Albrecht Tubke, and so on.
This show brings to the fore how pronounced British cultural engagement with India has become of late. The V&A itself hosted a very large, three-month-long India-centric show in 2009 titled, ‘Maharaja, the splendour of India’s Royal Courts’. With objects sourced from the royal collections of Udaipur and Jodhpur, it included Western and Indian paintings, photographs, textiles and jewellery.
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A little earlier, there had been another large show at the British Museum called ‘Indian Summer’, with paintings from the collection of the Jodhpur royal family, crowning another three months of various exhibitions and events all across London. Then in February this year, the V&A inked a memorandum of understanding with the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad to start a course in museum design.
British Prime Minister David Cameron’s cultural agreement with India during his July 2010 visit has put the seal of officialdom on this cultural exchange and has opened the gates to more events such as this one. The NGMA itself was the venue of a show by the acclaimed India-born British artist Anish Kapoor, which was supported by the British Council and London’s Lisson Gallery.
The set of works in “Something That I’ll Never Really See” was shown earlier at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum (which until 1975, had been called the Victoria and Albert Museum), where it closed on January 9. From Delhi, the exhibition will travel to Bangalore and Hyderabad.
Kate Bellamy, V&A’s influential head of international strategy who was in New Delhi for the inauguration of the show, says that the V&A is keen to develop cultural relations with India. “Be it in art, design, textiles or even photography, there is a lot of good Indian work out there,” she says. The museum is even looking to acquire works by contemporary photographers in India, she says. “India will feature prominently in V&A’s plans for the future,” Bellamy adds.
“Something That I’ll Never Really See” is on at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Jaipur House, India Gate until April 10 (10 am-5 pm, Monday closed)