Permeable dimensions
However faraway her photography may have taken her, Clare Arni has also been documenting and evoking the realities of mostly working-class Bangalore still largely immersed in traditional paradigms and occupations, always attuned to and respectful of the effort, condition and spirit of its people.
Such attentiveness to the immediate lets the aesthetic properties of the shots draw from the actual manifestations of its atmosphere. Her new exhibition "Street Space" at Gallery 545 (November 23 to December 21), in fact, emphasises, intuitively probes and blends both these strata of reality and of form as simultaneously literal and interpreted, raw and artistic. The merger of public and private dimensions with their diverse aspects in the look and behaviour of city roads is a familiar phenomenon that nonetheless asks for an ever new expression, while the artist has deepened it towards an inquiry into its roots and nature by focussing on the mechanisms of beautification of things common which as well bears on the character of art-making.
This became perhaps spontaneously triggered and enabled by the recent landscape of municipally sponsored wall paintings which here turn into existential backdrops and surrounds. Between the matter-of-fact indifference-cum-acceptance at the bottom and the condemnation by those in the know, one should admire Arni for choosing better quality paintings and for locating, even within the amateurish and the crude, many a graceful, vivacious and aspiring side to humble living. Like before, she approaches the subject lovingly and sharply. Hence, her noticing roughness and absurdities brings warm, sporadically mischievous, humour rather than irony as she indulges in a direct, close and distanced, observing-embracing the humanity of her protagonists.
One could assume a starting point and condensation of reality with perception layers as epitomised in the proximity shot from a Christian slum where irregular mud walls seem to be softly compressed into a loose palimpsest of frontal flatness and graded recess, of interiors innocuously spilling outside, the inhabitants and their possessions occupying all the dimensions at the same time. Their modest architecture virtually transforms into a brushed evenness, since the desire to make the place inspirational stimulated the people to cover its surfaces with naive but sincere religious imagery and sceneries, their borders running along with wall structures. On a very close level, that desire informs another shot that registers the abundance of plastic flowers and garlands being arranged for sale by a young man, the kitsch of their brightness eventually yielding poetry.
Thanks to Arni picking out murals that blend schoolish academicism with the realistic skills of old hoardings painters their near-illusionist representation helps bring out essential traits of the people around from the sense of their physical and mood-full presence to their existential situation - the exuberance of subdued women, whether Hindu or Muslim, the lushness of ritual flowers offered for sale in front of a painted temple, the naughty, delighted tribal fancily dressed in the national flag or the cocky vendor of vegetables and hats in his filmy attire.
With impish joy carefully combining her sights, Arni goads naïve art to reveal human moods - nostalgia in a young woman by sail boats, aggressiveness in the man-demon by a vendor of shiny crackers, pose similarities between a middle-aged man and a painted female, the more playful than surreal mannequin and skeleton greeting a ritual procession. On the other hand, a roadside dhaba, a bike under a peeling wall with posters or a nocturnally luminous, mobile shrine of Holy Mary on their own conjure visual lyricism and Mother Teresa's portrait does that when draped by eerily delicate festive lights, even religion-oriented objects with their hues, saturated in the kavachas and muted in the nuns' habits.
Seed ideas
"Salvaging Time," the interactive session of Jeetin Rangher and Katarina Rasic (Sumukha, November 28), was announced in a rather grand manner as a "continuation of the Green World Art Festival exploring man's tumultuous relationship with the universe."
In the actual it turned out to be a presentation with two joint performances intending to involve the audience. The first performance had a very interesting idea behind it, even though it did not flesh it out enough. Both artists were looking into each other's eyes while drawing lines on the table in order to know the other and mutually respond. Potentially promising, it would have necessitated much more sensing-enabling acts than it did.
The more complex piece about the changing urban moods and environs including mobile boxes-notions-buildings and poetry reading on a skyscraper ladder came through as a slightly self-indulgent token play, again without allowing a heightened experience.
However faraway her photography may have taken her, Clare Arni has also been documenting and evoking the realities of mostly working-class Bangalore still largely immersed in traditional paradigms and occupations, always attuned to and respectful of the effort, condition and spirit of its people.
Such attentiveness to the immediate lets the aesthetic properties of the shots draw from the actual manifestations of its atmosphere. Her new exhibition "Street Space" at Gallery 545 (November 23 to December 21), in fact, emphasises, intuitively probes and blends both these strata of reality and of form as simultaneously literal and interpreted, raw and artistic. The merger of public and private dimensions with their diverse aspects in the look and behaviour of city roads is a familiar phenomenon that nonetheless asks for an ever new expression, while the artist has deepened it towards an inquiry into its roots and nature by focussing on the mechanisms of beautification of things common which as well bears on the character of art-making.
This became perhaps spontaneously triggered and enabled by the recent landscape of municipally sponsored wall paintings which here turn into existential backdrops and surrounds. Between the matter-of-fact indifference-cum-acceptance at the bottom and the condemnation by those in the know, one should admire Arni for choosing better quality paintings and for locating, even within the amateurish and the crude, many a graceful, vivacious and aspiring side to humble living. Like before, she approaches the subject lovingly and sharply. Hence, her noticing roughness and absurdities brings warm, sporadically mischievous, humour rather than irony as she indulges in a direct, close and distanced, observing-embracing the humanity of her protagonists.
One could assume a starting point and condensation of reality with perception layers as epitomised in the proximity shot from a Christian slum where irregular mud walls seem to be softly compressed into a loose palimpsest of frontal flatness and graded recess, of interiors innocuously spilling outside, the inhabitants and their possessions occupying all the dimensions at the same time. Their modest architecture virtually transforms into a brushed evenness, since the desire to make the place inspirational stimulated the people to cover its surfaces with naive but sincere religious imagery and sceneries, their borders running along with wall structures. On a very close level, that desire informs another shot that registers the abundance of plastic flowers and garlands being arranged for sale by a young man, the kitsch of their brightness eventually yielding poetry.
Thanks to Arni picking out murals that blend schoolish academicism with the realistic skills of old hoardings painters their near-illusionist representation helps bring out essential traits of the people around from the sense of their physical and mood-full presence to their existential situation - the exuberance of subdued women, whether Hindu or Muslim, the lushness of ritual flowers offered for sale in front of a painted temple, the naughty, delighted tribal fancily dressed in the national flag or the cocky vendor of vegetables and hats in his filmy attire.
With impish joy carefully combining her sights, Arni goads naïve art to reveal human moods - nostalgia in a young woman by sail boats, aggressiveness in the man-demon by a vendor of shiny crackers, pose similarities between a middle-aged man and a painted female, the more playful than surreal mannequin and skeleton greeting a ritual procession. On the other hand, a roadside dhaba, a bike under a peeling wall with posters or a nocturnally luminous, mobile shrine of Holy Mary on their own conjure visual lyricism and Mother Teresa's portrait does that when draped by eerily delicate festive lights, even religion-oriented objects with their hues, saturated in the kavachas and muted in the nuns' habits.
Seed ideas
"Salvaging Time," the interactive session of Jeetin Rangher and Katarina Rasic (Sumukha, November 28), was announced in a rather grand manner as a "continuation of the Green World Art Festival exploring man's tumultuous relationship with the universe."
In the actual it turned out to be a presentation with two joint performances intending to involve the audience. The first performance had a very interesting idea behind it, even though it did not flesh it out enough. Both artists were looking into each other's eyes while drawing lines on the table in order to know the other and mutually respond. Potentially promising, it would have necessitated much more sensing-enabling acts than it did.
The more complex piece about the changing urban moods and environs including mobile boxes-notions-buildings and poetry reading on a skyscraper ladder came through as a slightly self-indulgent token play, again without allowing a heightened experience.