In Touch is a collaborative platform created by galleries to present online exhibitions at a time when gallery shows are impossible owing to the pandemic. Twelve galleries mostly based in Delhi and Mumbai, one in Calcutta (Experimenter) and three in Dubai recently held two biggish exhibitions online in two editions (April 24-May 24) and (June 5-July 5). Given the plethora of participants, galleries and exhibits, one can only write about a limited number of works and artists.
I shall begin with Adip Dutta’s exhibition, Form Anew, presented by Experimenter (In Touch 2). Here he revisits the desolate pavements of Gariahat market in Calcutta, once the hawkers have gone home, leaving behind their stock-in-trade tied up securely in a profusion of bundles and parcels, and through a network of lines as fine and strong as cobwebs, Dutta maps this patchwork quilt of packages, awnings of plastic sheets under which the stalls are erected, railings along the edges of pavements, the outstretched arms of craggy trees, sewerage pipes and dug-up roads. Tinted in muted tones of brown, blue, green, ochre and apricot, Dutta creates a carpet that looks as rich as any antique Persian Bakshaish rug.
The mutability of human life could not have been presented in so graphic a manner as in Mumbai-based Yardena Kurulkar’s black-and-white digital print, Neant, of a clay cast of her own foot disintegrating in water, the very essence of creation myths. Presented by Chemould Prescott Road, Neant, meaning void or nothingness, is in keeping with the artist’s engagement with the cycle of life and death.
Maryam Hoseini (Green Art Gallery) is originally from Iran and lives in New York. Given the context of the bowdlerized censored female body, her fractured limbs and body parts balancing each other, tread a path between representation and abstraction. G.R. Iranna’s (Gallery Espace) fragile latticework of lines on paper with terracotta and charcoal dust suggests movement, in spite of the stillness that the rounded form hints at, in keeping with the artist’s understanding of the dualities of life. Madhuban Mitra and Manas Bhattacharya (Photoink) present a montage of photographs of fascinating details of machinery in India’s only still camera factory in Calcutta (picture) and thereby dig up the tragic history of West Bengal’s deindustrialization without being nostalgic in the least.
In In Touch 1, Gallery Espace presented the spare and arresting non-figurative works of three women artists. Manisha Gera Baswani’s lines in her watercolours quiver with sensitivity. Shobha Broota makes waves with wool on canvas. Seemingly chaotic, probably playful, Mekhala Behl is at home in multiple media.
Anant Joshi’s is an interesting work in progress that he began working on during the lockdown, in keeping with Chemould Prescott Road’s request to its artists. Joshi began experimenting with drawings that resemble inkblots used in the Rorschach test. They are quite intriguing even in their unfinished state.
The upright wooden forms, some with tightly interlocked structures, are the hallmark of Lebanese artist Chaouki Choukini’s sculpted body of work that has a musical rhythm. He has been researching Arab modernism, and he uses wood, marble and bronze. His style may be mistaken for primitivism, but his sophistication and finesse are unmistakable (Green Art gallery). Fahd Burki’s (Grey Noise) reflective work pares down colour and form to the minimum, being part of a broader tradition of abstraction.
