| Bharati Kapadia: Staging the Sets |
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 Staging the Sets - 2007-2008 SeriesExhibition by Bharati Kapadia, Mumbay
Reception with the artist - Monday 3rd March 7.00 to 9.00 pm
The Guild Art Gallery is pleased to Preview Bharati Kapadia's latest oeuvre of works. Bombay based artist Bharati Kapadia is a well-known personality on the contemporary Indian art platform. Over the years, she has consistently shown work which is strikingly original in formal innovation. Dealing with issues related to inner evolution, memory and identity, she works with techniques in which the intervention of light becomes crucial for a complete experience of the art work. Her earlier works with rope and handmade paper were placed away from the wall and lit from the back. When light penetrated the work's paper body, its inner landscape lit up and stood revealed to our eyes. The constancy of her engagement with light as a catalyst to animate her work, is intimately linked to the artist's quest for gaining access to the inner light of realization without which, transformation of the self cannot occur Staging the Sets - Bharati Kapadia Bharati Kapadia has created a new series of works. Spend an afternoon with her and she'll tell you that they are a refinement of a message that she's been exploring for years; that they aren't such a radical departure from her other recent work. But look closely at the work and you may see a different story. Many of the same themes are there, made clear by the same watchful and benevolent hand, but these pieces tell a different side of the story. Spend an afternoon with Kapadia, and you will come away with a deeper understanding of the world. In her dynamic presence, you feel a growing sense of certainty about some things and to wonder at the insecurity of others. One undeniable fact the afternoon will impress upon you is the absolute necessity of her work. And when you spend an afternoon with that work, you begin to go a little deeper. This is no simple project, no crafty doodling. Her art is her mission. Like many artists, she comes to her work from an inner drive. Unlike many artists, her concern is less for the work as technical exploration than as spiritual discourse. The kind of experimentation with medium that often compels us as we create is there of course, but it is wholly subservient to a larger purpose: these works are less about seeking out the boundaries of a medium than about mastering that medium for communication. They are in part about speaking. But beyond speech - language is a tool she wields well, but which in the end is far too blunt - they are about implanting understanding directly into the viewer, avoiding the limited nature of speech. Kapadia's philosophy seems to drive her to create. It pushes her to evoke something important, something primal, and it challenges her to do it effectively. Like her previous work with transparent fabric and paper, her newest series feels like the act of creating life. But here, instead of gently scraping away paper to reveal the translucent and tender skin inside, she's begun to build her homunculi from scraps and surface treatments, stitching them together and breathing life into their frozen souls by covering them with hot paint and handprints. Staging the Sets continues to hone her vision, both by retelling older stories in a new way and by exploring what seem to be new interests and new thoughts. Larger in scale and made of denser material, these works have a concrete presence in the room. As she says, "they're characters." But they could also be shrouds. Or theatrical backdrops. Or they could be curtains, hiding something essential but mysterious. And unlike much of her previous work, the sense of her own mastery is strained. One feels that they aren't necessarily under their creator's control. Where one might have felt gratitude and love from the works that she so carefully healed in former years, there is a sense of menace in this collection. These aren't pieces that invite you to gaze lovingly through them: they are untamed; they are skins - surfaces that demand to be looked at, not through. They are marked and seasoned and flayed and then recovered, grafted onto other skins and presented as whole. As she moves away from delicate filigree and tightly bound, transparent fabrics, she is releasing something larger, less friendly, and ultimately less comfortable. These pieces, like much of her work, evoke feelings of personal history - an invitation to empathize with the artist through scratchings and scribbles, marks and threads and bindings and textures. And with the tenderness of a longtime caregiver or a surgeon, she calls on the viewer to understand these misshapen creations as whole, in spite of the wounds and the sutures - and the often uncomfortable creases and folds that the fabric is forced to maintain. This work feels explorative. They may in fact be a culmination of well-thought-out experiments and previously understood sentiments, but in many ways they radiate uncertainty and frustration. There is an ambiguity to these pieces that keeps them from being facile, easy to understand exercises in tactile media. Instead, they seem like what they are: a flash of insight during a long journey. Far from being the end result of a long process, they are most likely a stop on the way. Aaron Bebe January 2008 Aaron Beebe is an artist and museum director living in Brooklyn, NY. His work can be found in numerous private collections and at Pierogi 2000 Gallery in Brooklyn and the offices of CB Richard Ellis in Manhattan. As the present director of the Coney Island Museum, he has designed and built several new programs, including a Small Business Incubator for art-driven commercial enterprise. His curatorial approach combines history and art, bringing artists to the museum to present their own narrative using the collection as a medium. Prior to his appointment in Coney Island, he worked to institutionalize the "personal" archive in his role as the archivist for theater director Robert M. Wilson, helping to pioneer the archive as art. He holds a Masters degree in interdisciplinary studies from New York University with a concentration in Art History and Anthropology.
Artist's Statement
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3.20 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved." |
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