Chintan Upadhyay makes Mumbai's Mithi river a censorial context for the perils of unchecked urbanisation.
Those familiar with Chintan Upadhyay’s work know that his “babies” — an iconic form he’s created for himself — is central to his oeuvre. Whether painted, or interpreted as fibreglass sculptures, in the past he has used the form to paint or layer with miniature art. It led to a distinctive body of work, and Upadhyay was soon catapulted into the forefront of art experimentation, but the artist is aware of the limitations he’s imposed on himself by working with these “controlled entities”. “It’s difficult to work with only one form,” he cedes, but insists that it is his interpretation of a world that is homogenised, a world of Bt plant technology, of a sameness of foods and tastes, a world where his babies are “simultaneously consumers and products”.
And recently Upadhyay took his babies for a bath. No, not to a shower, or to a dunking in the tub, but to the filth and grime and muck of Mumbai’s effluent-laden Mithi river. There, over a “picnic”, and accompanied by children, he dipped his babies — both paintings as well as sculptures, into the river. “The filth created its own textures,” says Upadhyay — but it also deformed some drawings, layered others with oils and effluents. “They are beautiful,” says Upadhyay, who has fixed them with resin and poly-urethane, “the textures are very strong, and if you don’t tell them they are the filth from the Mithi river, most people will never guess how the works have been finished.”
Upadhyay chose the Mithi as a metaphor for the river as well as for things that are wrong with our environment. Using his artist friend Anish Ahluwalia as a curator, he worked to achieve an aesthetic, censorial idea of the city itself. “When you look at the surface of the Mithi, it doesn’t look too dirty,” he says, “but stir it up and the ugliness surfaces, just like the city.” Using these “real elements” as an art form was important to both Ahluwalia and Upadhyay, but the artist used another intervention — he got the children to work on his “baby” drawings, and 60 of those now form part of the exhibition at Sakshi gallery in Mumbai (till July 5).
Yet, the two have avoided documentation of the process for the show. “I want people to draw their own conclusions,” Upadhyay says, “their interpretation or reaction is important.” Is this his most radical work yet? “I don’t know, I’m still young,” he muses, “such positions only get rooted in retrospectives. I’m still experimenting, the babies are still finding their expression, going in different directions.”
Whatever censorial argument the exhibition might evoke, one thing is sure: the “babies” are now sending out a message, they are no longer just a medium for Upadhyay, an observation with which he, surprisingly, agrees: “Everything about my babies is changing,” he says of their dynamic context, but because they still retain their form, “the babies themselves are not changing.” We’ve noticed that, Chintan.
