One Small Window

Fabien Charuau speaks Hindi, has lived in India for fifteen years and possesses a manic energy that is infectious.

Over two collections (entitled The Great Unwashed and Stumble Asleep) that cover the walls of the Matthieu Foss Gallery in Mumbai, he has used unique crops and the same set of subjects to explore the Indian male form as well as the idea of such men’s dreams.

The two collections of photographs are in turns poignant, dramatic, documentary and slightly troubling. They possess a two-sides-of-the-same-coin quality that prompts the viewer to want to see more while simultaneously making them want to avert their eyes.

The Stumble Asleep pictures are framed as perfect squares and arranged along one length of the gallery as slashes of pictorial narrative that tell a story over multiple frames (almost like a storyboard for dreams). Even a cursory examination quickly reveals how easy it would be to re-imagine what the ‘dreamer’ in each narrative sees, simply by changing the order in which certain pictures are presented.

While the tall frames of The Great Unwashed series are impressive and eye-catching I found myself repeatedly drawn to the strung-together narratives of Stumble Asleep. In the embedded video at the bottom of this post I’ve attempted to draw other parallels and contrasts in his works by showing frames from the two collections side-by-side. It all adds up to a fascinating set of pictures that put a fresh spin on the way everyday India has been photographed.

Mr. Charuau’s work is on display at the Matthieu Foss Gallery until 30th September, 2010.

It is not really comment-worthy that sculptor Prashant Pandey works with urine. Artists have worked with bodily secretions and fluids for long enough that this information shouldn’t generate any reaction.

What is amazing however is what the man has done with it.

Resting on its side, as if unable to take the weight of its own structure, in the vast exhibition space at Gallery Maskara is a large skull fashioned after the deformed skull of a girl child who was not allowed to live. From afar, this skull looks like some bejeweled approximation of the diamond-studded brain cage made famous by Damien Hirst. It is only upon closer scrutiny that one realizes that the artist has sealed urine in small bags (also sweat and tears by his own admission) and each of those bags forms the pixels that add up to the three-dimensional surface area of this memorial to the unwanted (and often rejected) Indian Girl Child.

This is pretty powerful stuff.

Elsewhere in the cool confines of Abhay Maskara’s dramatic exhibition space on 3rd Pasta Lane in Colaba we can see Mr. Pandey’s repurposing of cigarette butts to make a beautiful floral arrangement (again requiring very close examination to identify the origins of the raw material); and other pieces made with blood, discarded bank notes, sugarcane and expired chocolate.

Entitled Shelf-Life, Prashant Pandey’s solo exhibition runs at Gallery Maskara until September 26th.

Do yourself a favour and make the time to go see it.

A new exhibition went up on the walls of Mumbai’s Gallery BMB on July 6th. We were there to watch the four photographers (Gauri Gill, Anup Mathew thomas, Vivek Vilasini and Shankar Natarajan) whose work features in the exhibit, mingling with the opening night invitees.

In our continued attempts to document the world around us, we made another short video based on a conversation with Bose Krishnamachari, the curator of this show, as well as art crtic Ranjit Hoskote.

On June 11th, the same day the 2010 Football World Cup got underway in South Africa, multi-disciplinary artist Riyas Komu opened his new show at Gallery Maskara in Mumbai. As part of our new endeavour to cover events of artistic significance we created this piece from short conversations with the artist, as well as gallerist Abhay Maskara.