The following essay is based on the exhibition ‘Displacement’ by Abir Karmakar, held
at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke subsequent to the 3rd Kochi-Muziris Biennale
2016. On display are large-scale interior paintings, executed in oil-on-canvas, from
the series ‘Home’ (2016), first showcased at the Kashi Art Gallery, a traditional house in
the South Indian style, and one of the prominent venues of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.
Complementing five of the Biennale paintings with three recent interiors (2017) for
the gallery show, Karmakar revisits and further interrogates the core subject matters
of ‘Home’, such as site-specificity, identity, memory, and belonging. In addition, the
exhibition at Mirchandani + Steinruecke provides him with an accurate frame to
reconfigure the role of contemporary painting by relating it to the spatial contingencies
and economic imperatives of the gallery context.
The Door
Showcasing Karmakar’s virtuoso skill at creating convincing visual illusions on a flat
surface, these untitled paintings of domestic interiors are rooted in the Dutch genre of
the 17th century. Known for ranking his artistic practice within the lineage of Western
art history, Karmakar draws on this early modern period, where the value of a work of
art depended as much on its content as on the quality of its execution. However, in his
quest of rethinking the visual formula for the depiction of realistic space, Karmakar did
not immediately embark on the rendition of large-scale interiors. The cornerstone for
the latter was laid in 2013 with a painting of a single, life-sized door. This early painting
was based on the conceptualization of the door as an autonomous entity, extracted
from the wider narrative and compositional syntax of the interior.
Aligning the shape of the door with the shape of the canvas, Karmakar saw the
opportunity to engage in the exploration of the function of ‘meta-pictorial’ devices. In
early realistic paintings, doors, windows, curtains, and mirrors were employed as
deceptive elements, visual ‘artifices’ that conjured the illusion of infinite space. One is
reminded of Velázquez’ painting Las Meninas, whose vanishing point is the doorway,
where a person rendered in silhouette appears to hold open a curtain on a short flight of
stairs. In addition, the doorway offers extra light to the rear of the painting, alluding to
an undefined space behind.
Karmakar covers the surface of the door with meticulously painted stains, scratches,
and traces of dirt, numerous marks that not only speak of the door’s function, but also
the cultural, social, and class origin of its user. The realistic rendition of the door lures
the beholder into surrendering to the visual illusion of an infinite space behind.
However, Karmakar’s intent is not to renounce two-dimensionality by creating a wall
object, as such ‘give up working on a single plane in favor of three dimensions’.[1] Rather
does the shape of the door serve as the painting’s frame and is thus an integral part
of it. It is, precisely, remaining within the confines of the flat surface that allows him
to stage the painting’s fictiveness and provoke the beholder’s awareness of self deception.
The Absent Figure
The creation of large-scale interiors offers Karmakar further opportunities to
interrogate the epistemological implications of pictorial illusion. Unlike the classic
Dutch genre, which depicts the figure in relation to the space, Karmakar’s interiors are
entirely devoid of human presence. In muted colours, he celebrates the palpable
tension between the glaring absence of the figure and its presence made visible
through the objects of everyday life. Suitcases, kitchen utensils, clothes, trinkets, and
furniture imprint the empty space with their marks. Like the door, they are not
inanimate objects, but encode a layered past, memories, and a belonging that go
beyond their utilitarian function. Manifesting an expressive subjectivity, these objects
draw a psychological portrait of the absent figure in relation to the space, similar to
Candida Höfer’s large-scale photographs of empty interiors. ‘I realized that what
people do in those places - and what the spaces do to them - is more obvious when
nobody is present, just as an absent guest can be often the topic of a conversation’.[2]
The delicacy of Karmakar’s brushstroke, his technical proficiency with pigments and
the subtle and precise effects of light lend these objects almost anthropomorphic
qualities, such as the ability to withdraw from the external world by dreaming. ‘The
furniture takes on elongated shapes, prostrate and languorous. Each piece seems to
be dreaming, as if living in a state of trance, like vegetables and mineral things. The
draperies speak an unvoiced language, like flowers and skies and setting suns. […]
Everything here has its appropriate measure of light and delicious dark, of harmony
Itself’.[3]
The Poetics of Home
Karmakar’s interiors evoke home as an inward-looking world of quiet stillness. Painted
with compositional clarity, these repositories of private experience have less to do with
functionality than with the way in which they convey a certain Stimmung, the tentative
mood of its absent inhabitants. These interiors represent a space of refuge in an often
diffuse, semi-tenebrous light, where time seems to be suspended. Simultaneously,
they manifest the inexorable march of time, as the external world constantly threatens
to invade this encapsulated realm of privacy. Apart from being a dreamy refuge of
secluded privacy, Karmakar evokes home as a social and cultural space, mirroring the
mores and habits of a Gujarati urban middle-class family of the 21st century.
The series ‘Displacement’ is based on photographs Karmakar took of the domestic
environment of a befriended family he visited in Kutch. Throwing light on the profound
transformation Indian society has been undergoing due to migration, he concurrently
retraces the story of several generations of his own family, which migrated from
Chittagong (now in Bangladesh). This personal story reflects the collective destiny of
migrants at large, whose existential dilemma lies in displacement and rootlessness.
Exploring the notions of home and belonging, place and identity formation, Karmakar’s
interiors, the arrangements of sofas and curtains, mirrors and framed photographs
with garlands, TV sets, and staircases that spiral to nowhere, speak of the irrevocable
loss and longing for an origin, of a certain nostalgia that is inexorably tied to the
possibility of return as the ‘culminating point’ of migration. Home is considered as a
space between a domestic reality, ordinary and mundane in its very nature, and the
evanescent,palimpsest-likememoryofsomethinglostthat lingers on in fantasies and
symbolic imaginings.
Karmakar’s quest of ‘What is home?’, a metaphysical quest in its very nature,
invariably leads him to deconstruct the topos ‘home’. Rather than being rooted in a
clearly identifiable and permanent place, the idea of the original home seems to stem
from the process of migration itself. It can only be looked at from the vantage point
of dislocation as the modus vivendi of migrants. Their acculturation and integration
cannot obscure the fact that identity is constructed and transformed through the
dynamics of dislocation, with the shifting of home being embedded in the temporality
of human existence. Even ‘non-migrants’ find it hard to unambiguously define ‘home’,
as one can have several homes that only partially match with a physical place. The
various implications of home as a geographical, political, social, and emotional space
lay bare its historical conditions and the impermanence of its nature.
Painting Revisited
Karmakar’s skillful play with illusionism and its capability of ‘deceiving the viewer’s
eye’ is linked to the reformulation of the role of contemporary painting. In the 1970s,
painting ‘seen as an art on the verge of exhaustion, one in which the range of
acceptable solutions to a basic problem - how to organize the surface of the picture,’ [4]
suffered a serious crisis. This crisis resulted in an abstract vocabulary devoid of any
illusionism and, in its most radical form, in the negation of the medium itself. In contrast, Karmakar further develops his realistic vocabulary, firmly rooted in the
classical canon of art history. Interrogating the conventions of his vocabulary and its
suggestive potential of deception, he exceeds the limits of visual illusionism in terms
of space, linking the medium to the contingencies of the site-specific context.
Integral to the production of the paintings for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale was the
incorporation of the physical conditions of the Kashi Art Gallery, such as size, scale,
topographical features, lighting, and sequence of rooms. In an attempt to align the
dimensions of his interiors with the exact dimensions of wall, ceiling, and floor of the
Kashi Art Gallery, Karmakar saw himself forced to render some of the painted objects,
such as a TV set and cupboards, with slight distortion to fit the spatial requirements. He
then cut a door-shaped opening into the canvas of one of the paintings that were
displayed at the entrance hall. This cut-out corresponded to the exact location and size
of the entrance hall door of the Kashi Art Gallery. Instead of deceiving the viewer’s eye
with a painted door resembling a real one, Karmakar forced the viewer to literally walk
through the painting to access the rooms behind. Bringing Lucio Fontana’s radical
gesture to mind, that consisted in overcoming the flat limitations of picture making by
slicing the canvas, Karmakar boldly ‘assaulted’ the canvas in an attempt to expand
the medium into the physical space.
Site-Specificity Again
Offering an experiential and spatial understanding of the historical Biennale site,
Karmakar decided to reformulate the term ‘site-specificity’ in relation to the white cube
of the gallery, often called a ‘blank slate’. In a critical approach to throw light on the
adoption and assimilation of this term into the dominant culture, he links it to the
dynamics of displacement. He ‘dislocates’ five paintings from the Biennale and has
them ‘migrate’ from the institutional context to the commercial space of the Galerie
Mirchandani + Steinruecke, assigning these paintings a new ‘home’.
The displacement of the paintings asks for an additional site-specific gesture that
consists in placing them on the gallery floor. Similar to the radical modernist practice
of freeing the sculpture from the pedestal, Karmakar frees the paintings from the wall.
He places four interiors from the Biennale as autonomous, free-standing elements in
Room 1 of the gallery, rendering their make-shift supportive structures visible. But
whereas the modernist sculpture severed its relation to the actual site by renouncing
the pedestal, thus achieving the status of a placeless, nomadic object, Karmakar’s
gesture of renouncing the wall is what relates the interior paintings to the actual
location.
In Room 2, he displays a space-dividing structure on which two interiors, specifically
created for the show, and spanning the width of the room, are stretched on the back and front of the makeshift support. As at the Kashi Art Gallery, Karmarkar repeats the
bold gesture of slicing the canvas to cut out a door shape, forcing the viewer once
more to walk through the painting to get access to the rooms behind. He challenges the
idea of what constitutes ‘painting’ by exploring the expansive terrain between painting
and site-specificity. Offering a comment on the constitutional elements of, and the
numerous possibilities within, painting itself, the medium is used to ‘interrogate rather
than accommodate the given architecture, disrupting the spatial conditions of the art
work’s site.’ [5]
The Protagonist
Establishing an inextricable relationship between the work of art and its site, Karmakar
demands the physical presence of the viewer as an indispensable component for the
work’s completion. Questioning the limitations of the medium of painting as a self sufficient
aesthetic category, he turns the viewer from voyeur into protagonist.
Designating the beholder a position within the painting by absorbing him or her into the
depicted scene, Karmakar offers an imaginary entry, which, for a single arrested
moment, makes painting and beholder fuse together. At the same time, the elision of
the gap between subject and object is revealed as pure self-deception, the veritable
‘culminating point of the involvement process’. Hiding and revealing the false premises
of illusionism, Karmakar creates the actual experience of walking on a stage. This
experience is enhanced by the visibility of the supportive structures, with the freestanding
interiors assuming an almost theatrical quality, making the beholder aware
that the reception of the paintings does not only include the spatial environment in
which they are located, but also his or her active involvement.
Emphasizing the presence of the beholder, Karmakar articulates the pictorial space in
its expansiveness, transcending its function as a self-contained whole. He subjects the
painterly practice to the process of self-renewal, rejecting the clear, epistemological
differentiation between pictorial and physical space in modernist paintings, proposed
by leading art theorists such as Rosalind Krauss. In discussing the ideological purismof
modernistpaintings,Krausssuggeststhat the‘[p]ictorial space is that which cannot be
entered or circulated through; it is irremediably space viewed from a distance, and is
therefore eternally resigned to frontality.’ [6]]
In Room 3 of the gallery, Karmakar stretched one painting dislocated from the Biennale
on a makeshift wall, replacing the gallery wall. This large convex-shaped structure
allows him to adjust the size of the painting, reflecting the slightly bigger dimensions of
the wall of the Biennale site, to the gallery room. One is reminded of Karmakar’s earlier
series ‘Views’ and ‘Angles’ (2014), consisting of empty and hermetically sealed off
interiors with no signs of a living being. Through a keyhole vision, he enables the viewer
to see the objects from different angles at one glance. Unlike these earlier series, where the beholder is kept outside the interiors, the free-standing structure in Room 3 asks for
the physical involvement of the beholder. The sheer size of the structure does not allow
him to contemplate the painting in its frontality. Rather is he forced to walk along the
length of the curved shape, bulging into the space, exposing himself to destabilizing
perspectives in order to experience the painting in its totality.
The Mural
Karmakar’s reflections on site-specificity not only address ideas of display and
perception, but extend them into the mode of dissemination as an imperative of the
commercial space. Unlike the institutional frame of the Biennale, the gallery brings to
mind the cycles of the capitalist market economy, which circulates art works as
exchangeable commodities. Exploring the genesis of painting, from mural to easel
painting, Karmakar traces the medium’s history from being organically connected to
architecture to its execution on a portable support. In Room 4, the last one in the
sequence of gallery rooms, he ironically plays with this genesis. He paints one detail
of the medium-sized interior, which he created specifically for Room 4 - a skirting made
of geometrically patterned floor tiles typical of Indian middle class homes - on the
bottom of the column facing the painting, which is part of the architectural structure of
the room. Likewise, he paints the surface of the gallery door adjacent to the painting in
one of the interior’s dominant colours to generate a coherent spatial environment that
integrates the main architectural elements of the room.
The gesture of painting the bottom of the column reminds of early murals at a time
when painting hadn’t gained mobility and autonomy from architecture. Reassessing
the relationship between painting and architecture, Karmakar demonstrates that siterelated
works of art are not just exchangeable commodity goods that fall victim to the
‘tyranny’ of capitalist market forces. As the series ‘Displacement’ manifests, the in situ
displayed interiors are not mere self-sufficient, trans-historical entities with universal
meaning. Rather are they experienced in the hic et nunc of an ‘unrepeatable and
fleeting situation’, emphasizing the spatial particularity and temporality of the location
as well as the ephemeral presence of the beholder. Karmakar ingeniously resists the
homogenization of space and the commodification of painting as placeless and
exchangeable. The exhibition is testimony to the celebration of the open-endedness
and continually expanding, self-interrogating and evolving nature of the medium. He
forces the beholder to critically rethink the prevailing cultural and economic value
system which circulates painting, throwing light on the conditions of its production,
perception, display, and dissemination.
Notes
1. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood”, in: Art and Objecthood. Essays and Reviews,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 148. The author describes the use of
shaped instead of rectangular surfaces by Stella, Noland, and Olitski to be experienced
as part of the painting and not as object.
2. Candida Höfer, in: ‘Candida Höfer en México’, Galería OMR, México: Turner, 2016,
p. 104.
3. Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Twofold Room’, in: Francis Scarfe (Ed.), The Poems in Prose,
with La Fanfarlo, London: Anvil Press, 1989, p. 37.
4. Michael Fried, ibid.
5. Miwon Kwon, ‘One Place after Another. Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity’,
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002, p. 5.
6. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Léger, Le Corbusier, and Purism’, in: Artforum, vol. 10, no. 8, p. 52.
Birgid Uccia studied Philosophy and History of Art at the University of Zurich. She has years of
in-depth experience in the international art world as the co-owner of a gallery and project space
in Zurich, author of catalogue essays and reviews and curator of “Art Clips”, a video art project
commissioned by National Swiss Television. She is the founder of ACFA Asian Contemporary Fine Arts, providing curatorial and independent art advisory services in the field of contemporary art from India and the Subcontinent. Drawing parallels between Western and Eastern art practices, her curatorial and academic expertise provides a considered framework to promote contemporary art from the region. She was nominated senior curator of St. Moritz Art Masters 2014, focus India, and guest lecturer on Indian Modern and Contemporary Art and Art Market at the University of Zurich, Art Market Studies Executive Master Program. She has recently curated the group exhibition ‘Waste Land’ in collaboration with the Consulate General of Switzerland in Mumbai and TARQ Gallery.