The world in a box

ARTWALK

Mamta Singhania's move might be either judicious or foolhardy depending on your point of view, for the slice of Noida that she has claimed as her space (after galleries in Kolkata and Delhi) might seem a little "" out of the way?

But she could not have chosen better than Sumedh Rajendran to launch the Anant Art Gallery earlier this month. His detritus of the urban world is all around "" the ponies and ceramic-tiled loos and even markets where steel trunks wait to carry away dowries for brides that may or may not be meant for burning.

The trunk is his new metaphor, the steel replacing (gradually) the spitted on/puked upon/ peed on ceramic tiles that are his most visible symbol of crowded/neglected urban areas.

His Kerala roots betray him in the hopelessness he sees in the human condition of the cliched rich and poor juxtaposed, at odds, but co-existing as, in fact, they do.

Rajendran's family of painters could not hold him to the medium, and the Trivandrum-based artist came to Delhi in search of instruction, first, then accommodation.

He found the latter "after a struggle", he says, and a decade later he's still struggling "" with his ideas, with Delhi, for legitimacy for installations, and for the unease he surrounds himself with by way of his calling.

Do you blame people for startling away (and snapping the fingers shut over their wallets) when he scorches your visual sight with a helplessness (caged diaphragms doubling up as valises, rockets nestling into everyday spaces), a controlled rage at the constant denigration of the human spirit.

That unease surrounds him, is palpable. "...so many people in Delhi," his arms flutter ineffectually, "so much..." The articulation, though, is a poignant symbol in his work, darkly lit on to the whitewashed walls of the industrial looking gallery. Right up in front, boldly slanting into decline, is his steel flyover crafted entirely from steel trunks.

"I wanted to build a city of trunks," he falters, but a flyover under construction at Dharavi in Mumbai took him away from that task. Here was humanity, hundreds of workers, working 24x7 on the flyover, and all they carried with them was their trunks "in which they stored all their belongings, all their memories".

In another sense, the trunks are no less than a memorial for the anonymous worker who toiled and very likely died in the making of a city monument over which only the very rich with their fast cars would have access.

His images (and choice of materials) may be commonplace, but his ideas hover in the realm of the analyst. He denies a sense of pessimism, though he is not, he says, an optimist.

And in the catalogue for the show, Final Call, he shares: "The fact that you have moved to the metro doesn't mean you have cultivated some new faculties in you. Even if you are living in a city, it is a natural way of existence. It is a natural transformation and a necessity "" that you change with the present condition and there is nothing artificial about it. If as an artist I try to cultivate something then it becomes fake. When I use tiles and images of a public urinal, I am aware of what I am going to do with it."

Final Call will run till January 6, and then Rajendran will return, he says, almost a year later, with shows for the Bodhi Art Gallery in Mumbai and New York. What he brings in his steel trunks we'll have to wait to see.