The Tree from the Seed

"The Tree from the Seed" exhibition at the Henie Onstad Art Centre in Oslo, 30th January – 27th April 2003, gives a broad presentation of the young Indian contemporary visual arts. The exhibition is curated by Gavin Jantjes, the artistic director of Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, advised by Alka Pande, Director of the India Habitat Centre Art Gallery in New Delhi, Peter Nagy a free lance curator in Delhi, and the internationally renowned cultural critic Geeta Kapoor. Many of the participating artists will be present at the exhibition's opening and will participate in a one day conference on Saturday the 1st February 2003 which starts at 10.30.

"The Seed from the Tree" is more than a pageant brought to Oslo from the other side of the world. This exhibition, with all its' wondrous works of art, aims to do more than entertain us. It takes its title from an essay by the great sage and poet Rabindranath Tagore.

"Art is not a gorgeous sepulchre, immovable brooding over a lonely eternity of vanished years. It belongs to the procession of life, making constant adjustments with surprises, exploring unknown shrines of reality along its path of pilgrimage to a future which is as different from the past as the tree from the seed. Art represents the inexhaustible magnificence of our creative spirit; ... " 
Rabindranath Tagore Art and Tradition 1926

Published almost eighty years ago, at the height of the European debate on Modernism, Rabindranath Tagore's view on traditional and contemporary art has remained central to the discourse on the visual art of India for most of the twentieth century. Our unfamiliarity with Tagore's art and philosophy in Norway, also leaves us uninformed about the "procession of life" his nation's contemporary art has made over the past seventy years or more. India's journey has been successful and extensive. Thus, it is impossible to place the "inexhaustible magnificence of India's creative spirit" into one single large scale exhibition in Norway.

The artists Atul Dodiya, Anita Dube, Subba Ghosh, Suboth Gupta, Reena Saini Kallat, Jitish Kallat, Bharti Kher, Sonia Khurana, Surrendran Nair, Rehka Rodwittiya, Sharmila Samant and Hema Updahyay have all acquired international reputations founded on their success at home. These newly emerged artist have made their mark internationally, participating in exhibitions in major museums and art institutions which include Tate Modern in London, Museum Reina Sofia in Madrid, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Kiasma in Helsinki, The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and The Japan Foundation in Tokyo, to name just a few. There have also been Indian artists participating in art events like the Documenta 11 in Kassel, and the Biennials and Triennials of Lyon, Yokohama, Brisbane, Havana and Johannesburg. Their works are creative answers to the post-modern interrogations of identity, globalism and tradition. They have been chosen to convey a sense of what pulses through the veins of India's contemporary art scene. They do not constitute a group or follow a manifesto and it would be unfair to place them in the role of representatives of their national culture. They live and work in the cities of Mumbai, Vadodara, and New Delhi and unlike their predecessors they see no need to uproot themselves to a culture far from home to make their contribution count. There is a common thread that their works share. It is the interplay of traditions, both Indian and European, with global discourses of culture. This is narrated through a variety of visual languages.

The artists have mirrored their nation's sense of independence, challenges and many other aspects of its progress. By doing so, they have not remained silent about the political and religious conflicts that continue to hamper progress in India. In this way they provide a kaleidoscopic view of the nation's development.

The paintings of Jitish Kallat, Rehka Rodwittiya, Atul Dodiya, and Surrendran Nair display a great variety of styles. Dodiya breaks convention by painting with house hold paint on roll up shutters used to secure the front of shops in the market place. The living and the dead, the sacred and the profane co-exist in these works. The large scale paintings of Jitish Kallat have the visual look of a television still. They hold the flow of our time in parenthesis and confront us with the gritty reality of political activism. Rehka Rodwittiya's paintings seem to come at one from the other end of the cultural time line. Her female figures have the classical serenity of temple goddesses all over the world and they hum a history as old as the traditional female garments on which they are painted. Nair's ecthings are a picture book of signs and symbols that stem from life, religion and politics. Installations by Anita Dube, Suboth Gupta, Reena Saini Kallat, Sharmila Samant and Hema Updahyay, bring an array of local and international stories into the gallery. The objects Dube and Gupta find in the domestic environment or the market place have their meaning transformed from commodity to cultural object, or in the case of Updahyay, with her thousands of cockroach sculptures invading the gallery walls, a transformation from nature to culture. In a grand gesture to the transformation of the mundane to the sacred, Gupta has made the milkman's delivery vehicle, a Vespa scooter and milk cans, into an glistening venerated object as if to suggest that only the gods drink milk. The classical Indian Sari and the logo of Coca Cola are woven into a tale of global economics by Samant and the craft of shaping objects by hand from natural and waste materials is extended in the work of Reena Kallat. The video of Subba Ghosh with himself as sacrificial subject being buried in ash, sawdust, paper and flowers, speaks of life and death in the everyday. The life size animal sculptures of Bharti Kher mixes sexuality and religious belief by covering their surface with stick-on coloured Bindis (the sperm shaped symbol Indian women stick on their foreheads between the eyebrows). They speak of the vast pantheon of animistic deities in the many religions of India.

"The Tree from the Seed" cannot show the whole tree. It presents for the first time in Norway, a large group exhibition of some of the most recent shoots from the vigorous expanse of growth that has emerged as India's contemporary visual art over the last half century.