Walking into Sydney’s Gallery Barry Keldoulis one is instantly drawn into a dream of piquant colours, mesmerising, repetitive floral patterns, and futuristic machines. Somnium Genero02 or Dream Weaver, is the first Australian exhibition of works by the fascinating duo from India going by the moniker Thukral & Tagra.
Jiten Thukral (b. 1976) and Sumir Tagra (b. 1979) work collaboratively in a wide variety of media - painting, installation, video, graphic and product design. They met in art college, and began would share ideas and opinions “We constantly found that we were both working on the same thoughts, we were always on the same page,” says Thukral. Both now married, live on the same block, in Gurgaon, Delhi. “It is our home and studio,” says Tagra. “Our life is not separate from our work.”
“Somnium Genero emerged from all our dreams and nostalgia relating to our past,” says the duo. Meeting them, you will find, the works emerge directly from within the artists¾it is difficult to pinpoint a single thread of consciousness that drives them, but rather a multitude of interweaving memories, observations and broodings that make their work.
In this exhibition, massive blue globes emerge from a deep maroon wall, each painstakingly embellished with T & T’s eccentric assortment of silhouetted chimpanzees hanging from the aerial of a retro TV, a trumpet emerging from the edges and of course the artist’s signature - a videogame caricature of the duo. In fact, when you look at them in real life, they seem to have walked straight out of one of their paintings¾Thukral in chequered jacket, paired with silver sneakers with the green Nike tick.
“Is that a banana peel?” I ask looking at one of the installations. “To us, it is a flower petal,” says Thukral. “But, it could be anything,” adds Tagra. They speak in a unison of words, as they do with paint in their work.
For the next instalment of this project, they are working with psychiatrics to design a machine, which when worn by an audience member, will interpret his thoughts in a series of visuals. And if you can’t make it to the exhibition in Sydney, images from this series are soon going to be on Coke cans globally - rather fitting for T & T, who for an earlier major exhibition, Everyday BoseDK (get the pun?) lined gallery walls with hundreds of bottles, jars, cans and boxes bearing their logo - BoseDK (not yet? Read it aloud, and think Punjabi abusive term). A joke on our society’s tryst with consumerism-a la Andy Warhol (who rather celebrated his victim, most famously the Campbell Soups can) and Takashi Murakami (whose cartoon figures become eminently consumable on designer handbags, souvenirs and jewellery).
Yet, they are decidedly Indian. Not in their imagery¾in that they are quite rootless and cosmopolitan. In fact, Peter Nagy, director of Nature Morte, writes in an essay about the duo, “Exactly how ‘Indian’ do they (the audience) require Indian contemporary art to be? How many local signifiers, ethnic references or traditional trappings are necessary to fix any contemporary product to the land in which it was made?” This is a question he raised, last year as well, when he brought to Sydney, Jitish Kallat’s Rikshawpolis, an epic reading of the city of Bombay.
While there is no ‘Indian’ imagery, the inspiration and thought processes that go into each work, are very much so. Tagra says he finds inspiration in the metro stations of Delhi. “The new metro trains bought a cultural change in the people¾they seemed to dress up better, feel more confident, and did not litter the way they did at the regular train station,” he says. They shot video footage of their observations in the Delhi Metro stations.
Their work is based on Punjabi Aesthetics, Tagra says. A pertinent example, was their exhibition, Adolcere-Domus or House of a Teenager, for their solo project in the Art Statements section of the prestigious Basel Art Fair in June 2007. For this project, the duo religiously documented and painted several youth from Jalandhar¾their traditional style portraits encased in baroque wooden frames or pasted on chocolate-syrup bottles¾a pun on the Indian notion of chocolaty-hero. At the exhibition, T&T distributed stickers and buttons of the designs, while the garments of the portrait ‘models’ were on sale¾of course under the signature BoseDK line.
As the essay in the book accompanying this exhibition explains, “BoseDK Designs permits Thukral & Tagra a platform from which to infiltrate any available media, to saturate all possible avenues with their aesthetic. Commissions can be accepted (as they have for the design of fashion boutiques and corporate offices in India or the production of T-shirts for Benetton) without hesitation as the compromise of ‘selling-out’ has been predestined from the start.”
No comments:
Post a Comment