Revelation or hallucination? Many visitors to Andreas Volwahsen's photo exhibition of monuments like the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, Fatehpur Sikri and the caves of Ajanta and Ellora, which opened last Saturday in Mumbai, will likely ponder that question and find the experience moving, even unsettling. While the roll-call of monuments might sound predictable, the perspectives of the Taj or the Red Fort, for instance, are unfamiliar and could be of somewhere else altogether.
Banish thoughts of those postcard-style photos so beloved of honeymooners in front of the Taj or the views of the Red Fort that we see on August 15. Andreas Volwahsen's photos of the Taj in this exhibition curated by Tasveer include one of a side dome so perfectly round that one comes away with a new appreciation of why these were hallmarks of Persian, Mughal and Turkish architecture of the period. These photos are all in black-and-white, the better to appreciate the geometrical genius of the medieval era. If you think of black-and-white as essentially, well, monochromatic, look at the interior shots of the Taj (the bottom of the left hand column on this page) and the cupola of the Jain temple in Mount Abu (directly above it) and you are likely to gasp at the lavishness of these photographs.
Remarkably, Volwahsen, 73, turns out not to be a photographer by training but a German architect. He also has a master's in urban planning from Harvard University. Significantly his PhD was on the observatory of Maharaja Jai Singh of Jaipur in 1972. It is easy to see why someone like Volwahsen, blessed with a reverence for geometry and symmetry that is uncommon even for his profession, was drawn to those sun dials of Jai Singh. His depictions of the Jantar Mantar in Jaipur are show-stoppers out of a sci-fi film. In this extended love song to India's monuments, Volwahsen brilliantly straddles that debate about whether history should document the common man or be a celebration of kings and queens. In architectural terms, he turns our attention to the foot-soldiers of great monuments rather than the buildings themselves, glorifying columns and arches and windows in ways that render them majestic. His photo of the jalis of the Red Fort provides such a clever interplay of light and shadow - and geometry - that for a moment we forget the Red Fort.
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This dislocating sensation is reinforced looking at his photograph of the gigantic arches of the 14th century Gulbarga mosque in Karnataka and the tomb of Mohammed Adil Shah, the southern Indian contemporary of Shah Jahan who ruled in the Deccan in the 17th century. But for the person nonchalantly leaning against the arches of the mosque, it could be mistaken for an ornate hand fan of a giant queen. The photo of the exterior of the mosque is so foreboding that surely this is Dracula's castle in Transylvania? I visited these monuments in Bijapur and Gulbarga just a few years ago and yet it was as if I had never seen them. And so one wanders through this exhibition, seeing things anew at every turn. That is what art promises, but in the muddled world of contemporary art delivers all too rarely.
The exhibition will be on in Mumbai till December 10, 2013 at ICIA House, Kala Ghoda, Mumbai. It will then travel to Bangalore, where it will be on display at Tasveer, Kasturba Cross Road, between April 18 and May 9, 2014
