“Life is not Made of Atoms, but Small Stories”
So the time has come when the city of Surat has opened its doors towards art and culture and a new perception of looking at it. Art helps us to see the mundane episodes of life with much deeper insight and sensitivity. The works selected for the show portray such simple incidents from life with a narrative visual approach.
“Narr
ative art is art that tells a story, either as a moment in an on going story or as a sequence of events unfolding over time. Through varied images and wordlessness these painted stories activate a r esponse in the viewer, extend an invitation to converse. In that invitation lies the hope of communication and community, a conver sation that enfolds humor and mimicry, the pressures of a growing globalised economy, the cultural imperialism of television, the rise of fundamentalist forces, the challenges of surviving in this constant state of flux all combined to form a palimpsest of satirical images can be seen through the eyes of a creator: the eyes of an artist.”
The title as well as the curatorial endeavour projects the figurative narrative tendencies in its varied versions. It’s like having people back within the pictorial frame to tell their stories: the narrations of life situations. Different forms of imagined realisms take the shape of human figures and mythic beings. Indian literature and Indian philosophy are replete with the presence of human forms and their stories. So is the visual world of ancient and medieval Indian painting and sculpture: the murals of Ajanta, the Miniature paintings. Around nineteen eighties there was again a re-looking at these figurative narrative traditions.
The everydayness of the domestic life, the pleasure of looking at a candid moment from a fragment of a daily conversation reaches the pictorial frame. Metaphor becomes a sieve through which every dayness translates into meaningful stories. The experiential world of the painter and the route to critical realism often surface in many visuals featuring in this show. identities in fringes arrive in deep compassion.
Even the alienated life of an ageing individual in his daily struggle appear. The female bodies transcend their prescribed roles as objects of male gaze and confront the viewers with their self-possessed iconic presence. The works in this exhibition focus on human existence within the wider phenomenal world. Some forms are imagined through the history of past images: the miniature and the folk. Varied shades of human nature are explored through different languages of art practice like painting, photomontage, sculpture and video.
An attempt had been made to bring together a body of work from earlier time to the recent, opening up avenues to the different under standings of human relations and art, the context in which it was made and the context of looking at it in the recent times .
‘Every photograph is a certificate of presence.’
“The Photograph does not call upon the past… The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed.”
This is a need that may be difficult to comprehend for a generation that seeks quick salvation and instant immortality, an assurance and accessibility made possible by dint of the digital revolution. Every one, so to say, is therefore a photographer. Documenting, manipulating or fabricating the present, no longer requires days of careful planning-ahead or coming up with extensive logistical arrangements. The click-check-correct/delete routine has given a free run to shutter bugs, and diluted the laborious rigor associated with the craft of photography, many degrees. This shift, however, has taken many years to come about. The history of the introduction of photography in India and its evolution has been subject of much academic research and hardly needs special glossing over.
This show present photographs by five Indian photographers for first time in Surat. The exhibition chronicles the photographer’s travel and depth of research of India’s beautiful rivers in the mid-60 to till today, where they visited cities, villages and tribal regions photographing their original environments, along with the people who inhabited these spaces. These photographs constitute on important chapter in the history of photography in India, demonstrating great artistic sensibility, creativity and a unique understanding of culture
