Review of - ‘REMARKING THE RIVER’-Atul Bhalla 2007:

Exhibition view

It is some times one is destined to like an exhibition. On a wet march afternoon when one entered, the Anant Art center at Noida it was dripping wet…inside the gallery. Leaking the leaking roof and seeping water from the basement transformed the show into a site specific installation. There was mildew growing over the minimalist wooden blocks piled on to each other in fragile curvilinear straights, the lush green in the video projection of brutal lumber sapping, reflected off the wet floors and transfused in the damp wall to create an ambience of the ‘tropical wet’ under which the brutal metaphor of the tree being hacked and slowly sapping away stands out in a mellow disturbing manner.    It is this quality of mellow disturbance that characterizes Atul Bhalla’s ‘aesthetic approach’. As a Performance Sculptor and Photo Artist he reveals in aestheticising his intense performative experiences, using the possibility of mediamatic intervention to garb his encounter with ‘disturbing realities’.

It is obvious to state that his body of work shown at Anant Art Center (a body produced between 2006 till date in different residency/workshop studio context), is thematically centered on water. Instead let us being at the point where one reads Atul’s understanding of water as a metaphor for life. Not only a metaphor but in a sense also the carrier of life…eternal in existence…therefore the eternal store house of knowledge. The in episode Mahabharat in which the Pandava, are put to test by a water Yaksha Bhalla, reads the questions as nature asking us whether we are fit enough to rule the world.

His works have also been located in a certain engagement with ‘free’ access to water and nature. Strategically transforming nature into a public domain, Atul Bhalla by and large chooses to radicalize the gallery sphere into sites from which contestation can be articulated to enable us to re connect with our urban spaces and ecosystems. How far this intentionality gets realized is to be seen, and is dependent on how the artist negotiates within the nexus of production, consumption and patronage, and we negotiate through viewership, patronage and engagement. Formalistically he is engaged with the ‘shapes’ water occupies within its various containers; through the shapes he continues his formal engagement with Volume. 

 Title: "Wash/Water/Blood"          
   Medium: ( Archival Pigment print )                    
   Size: 13"x20"x(22 prints).
   Year: 2007
Though it is never really spelt out, water also stands as a cleansing agent. The series of photographs showing blood been washed away from the artist’s hands (after the hallal performance in the walled city of Delhi), plays with the oxymoronic tension between life and death. This engagement with purity and water (sometimes translating into purity of water), draws Atul to Jamunna, its environment, and its socio-political life. The life of Jamuna as it transforms from being a life giving river…choking as it slowly cuts through the city.  “If in the past the riverfront was a place of interaction and the river a conduit for barges and boats from afar, the water distribution and drainage systems put into place during the modernizing drive that redefined the architecture of the city in the colonial era, ensured the formation of a gap between the life giving river and the inhabitants of the city” . From Shukla Sawant’s February 2007 catalouge essay aptly sums up the linkages between environment and public domain Atul seeks to draw our attention to.

Washbasins, urinals, pipes, commodes for Atul become tropes, of our ‘choking of the river’, beautyfully solid casted with cement and Jamuna sand, these submerged casts in their etched glass boxes, negotiate our viewing through the projected prism of words and phases essentialising the questions posed by the water Yaksha to the Pandavas and Yudhishtir’s response to the questions. Temporary appropriating the ‘right to speak in behalf of the river’ Atul Bhalla uses the Yaksha’s question as a reflective introspection of our ability to make ‘policy’ under the onslaught of the forces of capitalism.

The observation that dead wood looses weight as water continues to evaporate out it, turned Atul’s attention to wood as a container of water…metaphored through the prism of life. The felling of the branch video, is in dialogue with the hallal performance in ‘Dilli Dur Ast’  residency. It is interesting that in this video, the camera lingered on the sight of the sap dripping from the  tree as it has being hacked by the artist, where as in the showcasing of the hallal (video being an integral part of it) the artist strategically stayed away from showcasing the spill of blood…consciously avoiding the aesthetics of gore. Ants running helter-skelter in the wake of the brute chaos of the hack, pose poignant questions regarding invasions, violence and capture. 

The series of photographs with the Piaos and other free water distributing agents have also originated in the ‘Dilli Dur Ast’ residency.  The Piaos established by Muslim, Jain and Hindu institutions, are still surviving as the only visible source of free drinking water, in a city where even the middle class accepts branded water as a reality. His attraction to the various Piaos in the city is definitely rooted in the realm of aesthetics. He has a very poetic understanding of form, and it is through this engagement that he has been ‘framing’ the Piaos.

Atul revels in being consciously artistic, in his acts of capturing and strategising the re-presentation of his ‘framings’: in giving an aesthetic validity to an object of his attraction, usually passed over as 'mundane'. A quest rendered significant by Atul’s constant re-thinking of what art is, and exploring the boundaries of what different modes art making can take.

firt published in artconcerns.com ...
images courtsey atulbhalla.com