Barbican Centre 10:00
What do you do when your world is falling apart? When regimes are oppressing, corporations are exploiting, society is crumbling and economies are collapsing? Well, you can fight, you can make art, or you can just live. The Indian artists in the Barbican’s big autumn show do all three.
In 1975, India declared a state of emergency and suspended democracy; in 1998, it developed nuclear weapons. The 25 years in between were decades of total tumult, which all of the art here tries in some way to address.
It’s a dizzyingly varied show. Navjot Altaf’s monochrome images of fists and mobs are angry, punk politicism, while Pablo Bartholomew’s photographs of parties and families are tender everyday intimacy. Nalini Malani’s early video work is a subtle, semi-abstract expression of disillusionment and anger, while Sudhir Patwardhan’s paintings are desperate critiques of rampant, destructive urbanisation. All these different approaches all still similarly moving stories.
Other works show people trying to live, to get by, in difficult times; the everyday scenes of Gieve Patel’s paintings, the gay men just existing next to landmarks in a country where homosexuality was a punishable offence in Sunil Gupta’s photos.
There’s a tangible sense of nostalgia and grief
India was a place in flux, and places in flux need moulding, influencing, like in Sheba Chhachhi’s portraits of female activists.
But in all this turbulence, things are lost, and there’s a tangible sense of nostalgia and grief to a lot of the work. Madhvi Parekh and Jangarh Singh Shyam use their drawings and paintings to try to hold on to lost lands, lost pasts, lost memories.
And there’s a lot of that here, attempts to get the past to make sense with the constantly shifting present, to save tradition in the face of modernity. Vivan Sundaran’s rough paper and steel hut does that brutally and brilliantly, as does NN Rimzon’s sculpture of a figure praying while surrounded by rusted, broken agricultural tools.
It’s a really good show with some really good art, helped no end by there being no wall texts, just a clearly written guidebook. The Barbican has spent so many years strangling the enjoyment out of their shows with reams of unintelligible bilge that it’s a relief to just be able to look at the art unburdened by bollocks for once.
In many ways this is entirely and uniquely Indian art dealing with an entirely unique set of Indian circumstances. But it’s also universal, it’s art about trying to get through the tough times, surviving tumult and turbulence, and knowing yourself a bit better at the end of it.
