Images that move

Cinema, video, painting, sculpture come together in an interesting exhibition curated by Ina Puri. Gargi Gupta checks it out.

In the family of visual arts, cinema and painting are kindred spirits. The two most evocative instances that come to mind are Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, a magic realism journey through the director’s dreamscape which progresses by evoking images more than it does by action or dialogue, and Crows where an art student (the director’s own alter ego?) travels through Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings, particularly his Wheat Field with Crows.

The early 20th century saw the famous collaboration between Louis Bunuel and Salvador Dali which resulted in the surrealist film An Andalusian Dog. In the Indian context too, you have M F Husain whose films like Gajagamini and Meenaxi are an extension of his painterly vision.

 

But Ina Puri goes a step further — she brings cinema right into the gallery space. “Urgent conversations”, which she curates at Delhi’s Art Alive Gallery, has Buddhadev Dasgupta’s Uttara playing as a kind of video loop on an LCD on one wall (the wall-mounted, television screen quite in keeping with the framed paintings). On an adjacent wall are framed stills from another of Dasgupta’s films, Bagh Bahadur.

Then there are several large-format prints of Golak Khandual’s photographs of Orissa’s tiger dancers donning their elaborate masks and make-up — “the process of becoming tigers” in the words of the artist — for a performance in Chandigarh last year.

Uttara, its theme of rustic idyll overrun by violence in particular, is also used by Riyas Komu in his installation, an arrangement of concrete blocks scattered on the floor, which references almost all the hotspots in the map of global violence — America, Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and even Orissa. where the artist projects a sequence from Uttara, a searing one of a church burnt by a mob, onto a block which is embossed with the stars of the American flag.

“Many of my films have ‘inspired’ painters,” says the acclaimed filmmaker, the last perhaps of the Bengal auteurs like Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen. “Dharmanarayan Dasgupta did a few canvases after seeing my Tahader Katha and so did Ganesh Haloi on Charachar.”

But there’s more to the show — a few paper works and a video by Jagannath Panda, a set of acrylics by Manu Parekh and mixed-media works by Valsan Kolleri (including one print on canvas, something that the artist has been experimenting with lately) and an installation by Riyas Komu. “I’m looking at different voices, I’m not looking at any format, whether in the artists or the concept,” says Puri.

But what are these “urgent conversations” about? Violence, and its concomitant “violation”, is one strand that viewers of this group show could read as a unifying “concept”. Panda’s “Innocent Hooliganism”, a five-and-a-half minute loop (the first time this artist is showing one of his video works in India) is a particularly moving testimony to the streak of violence inherent in even children.

For Riyas Komu, “Painting is the area of hope and I try to document in my paintings people who might otherwise not get written about.” This ties in with a series Komu is most known for — large-scale portraits, posters really, of the unsung.

The artist’s “Uttara”, an imaginative recreation of Dasupta’s heroine, a woman — all woman — helpless in the face of violence, is clearly part of the same series. Film, of course, is a potent medium and a filmmaker’s vision can take a life of its own, bearing fruit in the art of a painter far removed from him in time and place.