Themes of resilience, identity and survival resonate at IAF

The perennial quest for one's identity, stories of resilience and struggling for survival is an underlying theme that is resonating the make-shift walls at the sprawling venue of the India Art Fair here.
Conditions from across Nepal as well as the world around are being represented in the heart-wrenching artworks of six contemporary Nepali artists by the Nepal Art Council from Kathmandu.
Resilience for Nepalis can perhaps be best showcased in their fight to survive in the aftermath of the earthquake that struck the Himalayan kingdom in April 2015, and it is only natural that the calamity has directly or indirectly inspired such distressing artworks.

Printmaker Kabi Raj Lama's work echoes the trauma in the advent of a natural disaster and is a homage to the "9000 people who died during the earthquake".
The artwork, which is part of a series of lithographic prints titled "Fragments", are meticulous and intricate in design and metaphorically underscore the importance of faith in difficult times.
The artist has juxtaposed the motifs with ruinous and broken compositions, and arranged them in geometric patterns to recreate first-hand images from the site of the disaster.

"It is a tribute to the courage and resilience of people in the face of such unprecedented tragedy when faith held them together. It speaks of the fragility of the nature, yet within the fragments emerges enduring hope and survival," says Lama.

Another artwork by Anil Shahi offers a subtle yet powerful commentary on the human condition, by intertwining personal narratives of the artist as a dalit with the mythological tropes from the Mahabharata.
The work shows the body of a man pierced with arrows, through three different frames.
"Anil's work will speak to your audience. He is talking about the post-earthquake situation. It's like Bhishma... We have passed the earthquake but out government is not doing anything. It's almost like we are living dead. It is a very powerful commentary that is political using mythology," says Dina Bangdel, who has curated the artworks at the show.

While the theme of identity is omnipresent at the fair in some degree or the other, certain works scream out the helplessness of not knowing one's roots.
One such piece by Sri Lankan artist Anoli Perrera is being exhibited by the Theertha International Artists Collective from Colombo.
The inability of Perrera's aeging mother, who is a patient of dementia, to locate her roots, inspired her to create three artworks that capture the "uncertainty" of her situation.
"It is interesting to observe how people like her cannot even move themselves because they keep forgetting the past. They remain in this unusual situation. This work is a narrative about not having a sense of rootedness," says the artist.

Created in the digital medium, the artist has used an image of her mother and superimposed it with other images to create layers which have then been painted on.
US-based Nepali artist Youdhishtir Mahajan in his artworks showcased by Gallery Blueprint 12, gives his viewers an opportunity to get all their answers by introspecting and not by looking for them outside.
Using an x-acto knife, he cuts out texts from books and glues them together, leaving his audience with empty space to look at.
"I am interested in language and meaning, so I go to thrift stores and pick up books with titles that speak to me. Then I cut out the individual texts and glue them together in simple geometric forms.

"That way viewers are not preoccupied with the images of the texts and can meditate into nothingness. Instead of feeding them with messages or meanings, I allow them to stare at nothingness and look inwards," he says.
Also looking for his roots is Nepali artist Sanjeev Maharjan at the Nepal Arts Council. In the ruins of his former home that collapsed in the earthquake, Maharjan discovered seeds wrapped in plastic that belonged to his grandfather.
He was intuitively drawn and felt the depth of their connection to his identity.
The emotion is conveyed through a photograph that captured a performance that he did himself where he smothered his bare body with red mud and placed the seeds in a small bowl over himself.

"It indicates that 'this is what remains', while also identifying the vanishing relationship between farmers and land drawn by urbanisation," says Bangdel.
A community-based work that is showcased under the 'Art Projects' section at the fair captures the life - in videos, photographs, permission orders - in the 'No Man's Land' between the borders of India and Bangladesh.
"The border and the huge fence between India and Bangladesh not only divide similar ethnic groups of people having similar culture, language and history but interrupt the natural flow of biodiversity as well.
"It was an attempt to do the project across the border to shape and understand the strong historical, cultural and sociological contexts that govern in Bangladesh and India," says one of the artists who co-created the project.

The project concentrated on the villages of Bholaganj in India and Puran Bholaganj in Bangladesh, and the hope of the communities meeting each other without passports was realised on March 27 in the physical space of the 'No Man's Land'.
India Art Fair, in its ninth edition, opened to the public today.