Aakriti Art Gallery’s exhibition, Social and Political Injustice, Trends in Contemporary Art 2011, (September 9 to 30) raised high expectations that were far from fulfilled. Going by the title alone, one had hoped to see works by a cross-section of practitioners, both well-known and even obscure, whose works in the year that will be over soon had explored the aforementioned issue with seriousness. Instead, one was confronted with the works of artists who were either too naïve or too simple to grasp the meaning and ramifications of the title.

So it was once again a sad hodgepodge of ideas and images, some dating back to the early modernists, that were wide of the mark, as well as threadbare trends that are deservedly forgotten soon after they stop making the rounds of galleries. A mood of gloom and doom has dominated the Indian art mart for some years now, and galleries should avoid holding exhibitions of this kind if they expect a turnaround.

Most of the artists had tried to confront the problems faced by our society as a consequence of globalization and poverty, their effect on ‘victims’ like girl children and our crumbling identities. These are no doubt serious issues by themselves, but were treated generally in a vague or literal-minded fashion. Take Mithun Dasgupta’s painting titled, Celebrating Independence Day, which, besides harking back to Dalì, threw in vultures and undernourished children as well. And to rub in the point, Howrah Bridge straddled the canvas.

A church riding piggyback on a tank bit the dust, and the giant head of a Buddha rolled on the ground. A blanket that swathed the White House was gradually being removed and it covered a human being instead. Both were works by Pradeep Kalita, who claimed in the catalogue that he tried to “invent new strategies of resistance” through his art — a tall claim indeed by someone whose work failed to make any point whatsoever, leave alone impact. Sagar Bhowmik’s oil painting of a beggar was just another exercise in realism, his skill notwithstanding. The cloned dolls of Debasish Dutta and Parth Guin’s paper cups with messages, which, apparently, were a sign of protest, have been done to death. And Nantu Behari Das just cannot forget those large heads which he used to assemble with odds and ends. He had made one large head from fibreglass for this exhibition, too.

Even the otherwise sensitive and level-headed sculptor, Tapas Biswas, presented a pretty though sentimental piece fabricated from aluminum strips painted white of a girl carrying a heavy burden of weeds on her head, which, for him, is symbolic of the sufferings of the girl child. Maybe it would have been just right for another exhibition.

The sculptures by Akhil Chandra Das and Ketan N. Amin were so irrelevant that one wondered why they were there at all. Actually, both are quite skilled as craftsmen but lack ideas that they can body forth. That is one way of explaining away the weird works they displayed.

When the situation was so dismal, one was forced to sing the praises of two works that were not too bad, strictly by these sorry standards. One of them was Pappu Bardhan’s acrylic on canvas titled, It’s Party Time (picture). And the second, Buddhadev Mukherjee’s untitled mixed-media work on paper. Both had the virtue of being simple, unpretentious line drawings that made no attempt at philosophizing and thereby getting tied up in knots.

Bardhan’s drawing was of a woman’s taut tattooed torso in an itsy-bitsy bikini and successfully addressed the problems faced by a conservative society with a sea change in lifestyle thrust upon it out of the blue, so to speak. Buddhadev Mukherjee’s painting was in turbulence as thousands of tiny bodies balanced on a giant web radiated from the centre. For once, it did reflect the concerns of the artist. But just a handful of works of not-too-bad quality could not redeem a show this large and this poor.