The weathered, blackened, dismantled Anatomy of an Unknown Chair that he’d re-arranged with clinical, diagrammatic, taxonomic precision had won him the top slot in Cima Awards, 2015. But Mansoor Ali Makrani, though still relatively unknown in Calcutta, is no one-work wonder. Indeed, his solo show at Cima is stunning in its stark yet trenchant articulation. Stark, both because less is deemed more; and because geometric order — in the shape of chairs, a display stand and a bench — prevails as its visual tenor.  This show, his first in the city and on till August 20, introduces an artist of urbane thinking who can conflate multiple kissas of subtle innuendos around the common, yet contentious, kursi. Because, as a metaphor, it can have endless connotations, as the 38-year-old artist discovered when he was still a student at Baroda. 

If there’s a provocative archness to the rhetorical question, Whose Chair is it Anyway? — the title of the show — it is rooted in the mood of the average Indian left outside the protective umbrella of the moneyed and the powerful, who are often, though not always, the same. Makrani seems to understand that only too well. The ubiquitous bar code of commerce, therefore, becomes an insistent refrain: painted over chairs, printed over bedroom curtains, pasted on a blackboard. Not only are chairs and whatever roles they stand for reduced to commodities, to objects of mere transaction in the modern age, when power structures aren’t based on inherited custom so much as on constitutional legitimacy — people’s votes —there’s a sly reminder that relationships, too, come under power equations in which money plays a big part.

It is this leap from custom-sanctioned monarchs to Constitution-sanctioned ministers that is suggested in Makrani’s striking eponymous installation. Reproductions of the ruins of two pillars from Palmyra are stuck on the wall. Between them sits, a little forward, a resplendently white chair striped in parallel Op Art black lines of varying thicknesses: the seamless bar codes. The pretensions of the imperial age that the pillars represent have been passed on to an unadorned, new-age throne. 

However, shedding ornamentation for Bauhaus rigour doesn’t mean shedding the trappings of power. The anonymous pattern of lines — like the enigmatic ballot — holds the key to the identity of the chair: whose is it? Like the Pope’s 
vestments in Brecht’s Galileo, it’s the chair itself from which hubris emanates, taking over the occupier’s personality. By the way, if the present chair were scanned, the title of the show would appear because Makrani has used the actual software.

The irony of the ruined pillars lies in its negative assertion that nothing lasts. Because, as another thoughtful work of tentative ruminations warns in its set of nine X-ray films, Nothing is Real. The medium itself questions certitude and seems to propose perceptions, not empirical evidence, as the basis for reality. For here are ghostly, intangible, X-rayed negative images trapped in the film that are real but also unrecognizable, strange, palpably unreal. The awareness of how fluid and faceted reality can be, how Rashomonesque History can be is hinted in White Chair on a White Bed, where the artist asks, Which history do you want me to reclaim? There’s a tiny chair on a tiny bed under an eerie blue night light, which indicates that even intimate zones may not be free from equations of authority and submission, while the artist’s lines on the curtains evoke a delicate, brittle, amorphous relationship.

Not surprisingly, Makrani wades into History itself. A large blackboard has, on one side, numerous dates of battles from world history. Well, yes, bloodshed has, indeed, shaped History to an extent. Perhaps that’s why History is written in large red letters across the board. But it’s also relevant for present times for the discipline itself is a battleground of contesting interpretations. 

On the other side he writes of two primary human emotions — love and fear — which sounds startlingly Hobbesian, and reveals the artist’s level of critical analysis. Another work, Age-old Conversations, takes undeciphered scripts as the focal point under which are stone slabs — ancestors of today’s chair — for confabulations to happen ad nauseam, over the ages, without conclusions.

Makrani’s tone can go from deadpan banality — obviously inspired by Kosuth, to whom he pays tribute in this show — to impish satire in the hilarious, succinct, Chair with a Hump, to a reflective, confessional vulnerability in his lines on the curtains of White Chair. This promising diversity declares that, though the conceit is one, he’s lent it the range of a paradigm.