In redefining drawing as the fundamental structuring for imagination, Experimenter Gallery dissolves the term’s narrow meaning into an elastic paradigm. Its current show, Drawn from Practice, on view till October 31 at both its addresses, searches for the “testing boundaries of thought”, as the curatorial note puts it: the initial blueprint that mediates between experience, nebulous idea and concrete form, to investigate the elusive dynamics of creativity. It places sketchy prelims — notations, jottings, stage blocking and movement instructions and so forth — alongside the finished product across a range of expressions: dance, theatre and cinema, visual art and tapestry, as well as the exercise of writing.
To begin with Kanishka Raja, who died earlier this year at age 48. Some striking examples of his work have been presented here. His intricate 16-panel painting in a blinding combination of orange, royal blue and green, is built upon a dizzying anatomy of lines. It overwhelms you with an eerily futuristic Constructivist project that could belong in some sort of Leger city, post Fahrenheit 451, as it were. Equally dazzling is I and I with woven, embroidered, printed and painted patterns that seem to be melting, rippling, subtly refracted, in an exuberant palette that recalls Mexican folk art.
A Constructivist agenda is spoofed in the title of Sahil Naik’s 3D grids — Modernist Facades for New Nations — as their architectural rigour gets chipped off at intervals. This guileful play posits new models as infirm, leaving ellipses for unknown, unbidden adjuncts to emerge out of the framework. Srinath Iswaran’s diagrams are jauntily unpredictable, shooting off sharp lines in random directions from geometric blocks. And Rahul Jain’s rich textile is, of course, a pattern of lines.
With Bijoy Jain, the focus shifts to tactile surfaces with banana fibre paper that, treated with natural substances like lime and turmeric, yields captivating overlaps of porous, accidental patinas. Surface engrosses Abir Karmakar, too, but only partly. His meticulously painted door, Stack 1, standing in the middle of an empty space, is a surreal, Magrittesque visual, juggling conceits of privacy, intrusion, opportunity, barriers, forbidden mysteries and knowledge locked up. His brushwork reinstates the power of trompe l’oeil, stirring provocative suggestions. From established social norms to the fractures and conflicts that give rise to them: between individual rights and community claims, between openness and guarded social exchanges rooted in the concept of property and the class system.
Ashish Avikunthak’s single-take chamber film, Rati Chakravyuh, weaves a chain of teasing references as it proposes a hermeneutic conundrum particularly in its hilarious interpretation of the Ramayana. A wry cynicism trails the solemn conversation that slips from the banal to the bawdy, from the political to the philosophic, from sex to death among six just-married couples and a priestess — making it an unlucky 13 on a propitious night, foretelling doom — while a deadpan camera weaves slow circles around them. An electrifying lecdem video of controversial Karnataka music icon T.M. Krishna would whet any greenhorn’s appetite to devour his book for enlightenment about the grammar of this genre.
From another icon, Badal Sircar, come video excerpts from Michhil — an example of his street theatre that repudiated his brilliant proscenium phase — along with the sound track and seminal choreography of his acclaimed Evam Indrajit. Dancer Padmini Chettur, somewhat recalling Trisha Brown in her precise, sculpturesque movements, departs radically from the symbolic content in Indian tradition with her analytical approach to the body as slow, fluid theatre. And lastly, there’s the personalized journalism of Aveek Sen. Stimulated by experience and shaped by his exposure to literary, cinema and arts discourse, his thinking brings a special flavour to his articles published in The Telegraph.
