Reconstructing (White)3
Curated by artist, writer and poet, Himali Singh Soin, Reconstructing (White)3 throws nine differently interpreted 1 x 1 x 1 white cubes into the The Loft in Mumbai. These cubes are varied interpretations by some of the edgiest Indian artists, including Hema Upadhayay, Mithu Sen, Gautam Bhatia and Chittrovanu Mazumdar. Himali shares, ‘The show deconstructs the perfect cube – and reconstructs it – giving artists an important constraint: to create a work of art that exists inside – or leaks outside – a 1 x 1 x 1 white box fabricated from a material of their choice.’
We ask three artists to deconstruct their work.
Gautam Bhatia’s The Cube: The Good Life
In the cube, I am trying to address the idea of dissolution of domesticity, an absence of conventional spatial definition. The functions of home are absolved into an unlikely matrix, that defies the old understanding of home as a place of family and privacy, and the standard view of walled rooms as predetermined, repressed enclosures of stated activity. The four walls of the cube are defined in a painted landscape of a young multinational couple living a home life of affluence, leisure, indulgence, hyperactivity.
Living Room: Vice and Device, Dining Room: Gluttony and Excretion, Bedroom: Dream and Desertion, Bathroom: Privacy and Pretention.
Chittrovanu Mazumdar’s Untitled
With this piece, I’ve tried to address the white cube by problematizing it, complicating it. My piece is about connections, flux, the unexpected and uncontrollable juxtapositions of melody, image, experience, that daily life offers us and that living is all about. You are invited to peer in; you make the effort to approach it, as a voyeur, looking in to a space filled with the life of another. You see what is not meant to be seen; you sense an inchoate, incomplete life being lived beyond the six walls of the cube. You hear snatches of melody from different musical traditions – Eric Satie layered with a sentimental Bengali love song – a huge distance of two very different cultures and philosophies simply traversed by two interwoven melodies. Again, an experience very much part of the urban soundscape we move through.
Praneet Soi’s Untitled
The sense of unfolding lies in the drawings that went into making the image that are shown transposed upon each other. Thus the Hands, the head, the shoes are fragmented views of the same subject. The A4 becomes the cube as in the studio the most simple format to work with is A4.
Reconstructing (White)3 is on view from 23rd May – 14th July, 2012 at The Loft, Lower Parel, Mumbai._
By: Radhika Iyengar
Follow me on twitter @radziyengar
