NO!SE

At the dawn of the nineties when Contemporary Indian Art (CIA) was born, there was a clear feeling inside some sections of us, that a new era was being ushered in. Early breezes of neo-liberalism were blowing across the sub continent.  The USSR had freshly collapsed, Tiananmen Square was still fresh. The Rao-Manmohan era opened up consumption horizons for us and we kicked the moralist skeleton of Nehruvian socialism like Europe had kicked Catholic morality in the 18th century. Parallel to this global trends, Indian urban thought itself found it’s calling in the writings of ‘new thinkers’ like Arjun Appadurai, Gayatri Spivak.

There were always scratches and fissures in this narrative. Some of them raw…almost like wounds; however this narrative has been so treasured and protected from its contradictions, that anything that troubled its’ shiny surface was dismissed as obsolete, noise…or simply dirt. Even as the art was claiming to be more democratic, personal, political, fragmented and contemporary, the language which was adopted in art making and writing made art more elitist, urban and dystopic. As more and more public art is happening in India, the ‘public’ feels more and more distanced from the art object. Large crowds in art fairs are frowned upon in the fear that the discerning collector will get disturbed. More importantly we see a clear rupture, the international language of Contemporary Indian Art seems unable to hear, or talk to the large number of artists who have not, or have refused to catch up to this change in language. 

Strangely even though these very artists are considered to be residual or obsolete, it is with their art that the larger numbers of art viewing audience seem to connect. Naturally, in order to protect it’s self, CIA has dismissed this situation as reflective of taste and viewing traditions caught up in old middle classism. This (not so conscious) self positioning as avant-garde is still the biggest crisis visual arts are facing today. Is it yet time to acknowledge that instead of being a friend, the post modern is the post colonial’s biggest enemy?

NO!SE is an exhibition concept idea, which seeks to celebrate the stylistic reaction of a post digital aesthetics. The familiar (common) digital tropes of purity, pristine sound, images and perfect copies are abandoned in favour of errors, glitches, marks, fissures, and artefacts. This is a fast emerging trend in music, painting, photography and sculpture. These glitches can be seen in the artworks in the form of noise (stains, scratches, ruptures and jarring sounds) which disrupts the urban cosmopolitan taste.

A new strand of underground cultural practice can be seen in the contemporary art movement, which stems from a boredom with the monotonous digital finish, the mundane cosmopolitanism of contemporary art and the visual language of neo liberal hegemony. For a long time, it seemed that contemporary Indian art had become so insulated that it would fail to respond to and evolve with the changing times.  The art of this emerging underground creates a tension in the realm of aesthetic consumption, causing discomforts  by hacking into the mainstream taste, which still carries the bias stemming from age, class, gender and sexuality.

As fashion trends change and coolness takes on a new meaning, this meaning is sought in the craziness of noise rather than the image of the ‘ideal’. By breaking the flow of the artwork, the intentional error is able to draw attention to it’s self. Eventually as the awareness of the glitch and the aberration grows in the viewer’s awareness...the NOISE begins to dominate. 

The show proposes to invite four selected artists from the list[i] to hack into the system of Contemporary Indian Art (CIA) to propose a new algorithm as the global order stands at the edge of dismantling neo liberalism.

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[i] The long-list includes the portfolios of the following artists:

1.      Vidisha Saini 

2.      Nandan Ghiya 

3.      Hemant Sreekumar 

4.      Sahej Rahal 

5.      Paribartana Mohanty 

6.      Mandakini Galore 

7.      Mitali Shah 

8.      Preeti Agrawal 

9.      Drupadi Vatsal/Wahshat Ghosh 

10.   Sambaran Das