The uniting lines

It is perhaps not a coincidence, but it underlines prevailing concerns. In Delhi, the monsoon art season opened with four galleries hosting events that seemingly address issues of national identity and cartographic borders, both from a historic perspective as well as the contemporary nature of borders and the problematic representation of the nation state. We are told this is just the tip of the iceberg. 

During the summer we witnessed a historic Collateral Project at the 56th Venice Biennale, where Feroze Gujral showcased the unlikely India-Pakistan collaboration ‘My East is Your West’, featuring Pakistani artist Rashid Rana and Indian artist Shilpa Gupta.

While Rana’s work collapsed borders between Pakistan and Venice through a live timeshare streaming of viewers interacting with a classical painting in both countries, Gupta’s 10-metre-long outdoor light installation dwelt on the borders and enclaves between India and Bangladesh. 

The past four years have witnessed a burst of artistic conversations between India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Bhutan. Realising international curator Hans Ulrich Obrist’s prophetic words — “Art practices in South Asia should ideally speak more to South Asia, while it addresses the West…” — the Capital is host to several interesting cross-border projects.

Gallery Espace director Renu Modi is organising a four-month exchange programme — from September to December 2015 — between artists from India and Sri Lanka. She believes that a South Asian dialogue not only makes sense at a time like this, but is in fact crucial. 

“The political situation is so volatile currently, but we share so much with our Asian neighbours that it only makes sense to move beyond obvious exchanges of gunfire and cricket,” says Modi. “Cultural dialogue opens windows of communication, enunciating our shared histories under colonial oppression, while underscoring our differences.”

The Sri Lanka-bound artists are Riyas Komu, Chintan Upadhyay, Manisha Parekh, Manjunath Kamath and historian-artist Paula Sengupta. In return, Espace will host Anoli Perera, the founding core group member of Theertha — a visual artists-led initiative in Sri Lanka, Jagath Weerasinghe and Anuradha Koli. Going beyond producing art in a workshop or art camp, the idea is to absorb local culture, architecture, visit museums and collect artefacts. 

A one-month residency in Sri Lanka was the catalyst behind young curator Anushka Rajendran’s two exhibitions featuring South Asia.

The first is at Bhavna Kakar’s Latitude 28 in Lado Sarai running till September 22. Here you can catch Lankan artists like Pala Pothupitiye, Thisath Thoradeniya, Pradeep Chandrasiri and Danushka Marasinghe in dialogue with Pakistani artists Adeela Suleman, Amna Ilyas, Waseem Ahmed and Imran Channa.

The Indians in the mix are Niyeti Chadha-Kannal, Sarika Mehta, Sujith SN and Shailesh BR. The other show, at Shrine Empire, is in the pipeline. This fairly large exhibition is well-orchestrated, addressing issues around borders, maps and the ways in which they affected lived realities.

Pothupitiye’s playful, yet potent depictions of the Sri Lanka map — superimposed with iconographies like the national dress, traditional daggers, tiger claws and fishing hooks — speak of imagined maps that have come alive with the country’s history of colonisation and ethnic tensions, focusing on the cities of Jaffna and Colombo.

The subtle erasure of imagery in Channa’s large work speaks to Sarika Mehta’s delicate watercolour of birds playfully tugging at and changing the shape of the net representing the India map. 

“‘Lay of the Land: A work in Progress’ treats shared histories and relatable socio-political contexts within South Asia as a point of departure to chart the lived experiences of artists, consequently rendering political borderlines as superfluous,” says Rajendran.

You come away with the realisation that all maps are a work-in-progress, as it is impossible to capture the dynamics of constantly changing cities and countries. 

Another exhibition offering a vivid, historical glimpse into early mapmaking practices is the ‘Cosmology to Cartography: A Cultural Journey of Indian Maps’ at the National Museum, on view till October 11. Curated by the London-based Indian architect Vivek Nanda, together with German cartographer Alexander Johnson, it is organised by Hyderabad-based Kalakriti Archives. 

The gallery walls have been painted a bold black to highlight the rich variety of the over 72 maps spanning 400 years until the early 19th century. From the early hand-painted Jain and Hindu cosmological representations of land, complete with depictions of sacred rivers and pilgrimage sites, the display transitions to the ‘empirical’ cartographic depictions of the ancient European conception of the subcontinent. One can almost trace the colonisation of India from the time of Vasco da Gama’s arrival in 1498, to the ‘consolidation’ of India through the Raj-era mapmakers.

Back in Lado Sarai, yet another project explores nation, border and memory. Exhibit 320 showcases three artists — Nurjahan Akhlaq from Pakistan, Parul Gupta from India and Yasmin Jahan Nupur from Bangladesh — curated by Meenakshi Thirukode. 

Akhlaq’s collage-miniatures speak directly to the re-assemblage of tradition, the geometries of Islamic architecture that impinge on all forms of expression, and finally the kitsch of the bazaar. Nupur’s luscious red-velvet flowers negotiate personal histories with broader socio-political and environmental conversations embedded within the idea of nationalism. They also address a kind of mass forgetting. Gupta focuses on line and its relationship to formal and spatial negotiations within the architecture of built spaces.

Each exhibition brings into focus a unique aspect of South Asia, while this increased dialogue among the countries in this region provides an alternative and diverse narrative to being viewed as the ‘other’ by the occident.

(georgina maddox is a Delhi-based art writer)

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