Roobina Karode’s very ambitious collation of modernist tendencies in diverse media like architecture, film and text that are pivoted around oil painting, has the inward tendency of nesting one layer inside the another. Therefore, the viewer experience is revealed through passing through subsequent layers, like peeling the skins of an onion. Onion-skinning is a term used in 2D animation, where animators are able to see through semi-transparency of in-between frames, or the previous frames or the next frames. It is purposeful that I am using a metaphor from 2D animation, as one of the works in this exhibition of exhibitions, is the famous animation work Syzygy by Akbar Padamsee where various geometric forms are interacting with each other, like the formal and conceptual vectors of different galleries are intersecting with each other in this exhibition of exhibitions. What Roobina Karode means by stretching the terrain of the gallery spaces through their intersections and cross-overs can also be alluded to by the animation metaphor of onion-skinning, which is the ability to see through various layers in a timeline, which might be otherwise invisible.
Here, a certain kind of see-through overlay on a tracing sheet is imagined as the curatorial topology to see through the give and take between various media, such as architecture, film, text and oil painting. The centrality of oil painting in Indian modernism, or the cultural practice during the decades of “nation-building” is reinforced in this exhibition of seven exhibitions through foregrounding three solo shows, by three “male modernists,” Souza, Raza and Husain. While it is a visual delight to devour a large array of paintings by these modern masters, all at once, it also points to the centrality of oil painting as a medium. This is not only in the narrative of modernism of the new nation, but how the collector’s impulse is to centralize painting as the dominant commodity form, against which the broadening of the collection’s horizon - to architectural models and hand-written manuscripts, photography and films formats - are hedged.
While the curator is self-reflexive about gender imbalance in modernism through revealing the centrality of male modernists, this apparent unfairness in history of cultural production is offset by the inclusion of contemporary women artists in a nested exhibition titled Interpositions: Interplaying the Repository with Navjot Altaf, Pushpamala and Mithu Sen. The contemporary is marked as an assertion of the woman artist through the photo performances of Pushpamala along with Mithu Sen’s drawing and wash exercises based on gay sexual imageries of Bhupen Khakhar, and Navjot Altaf’s graphs and plump-line forms interspersed with architectural forms. But this sub-exhibition called Interpositions is not only about women artists, as it includes Atul Dodiya’s photorealistic grayscale oil paintings that depict episodes from the national movement which is a painterly reiteration in contemporary art of what was nationalism before the modernist moment of nation-building which is the central concern of this exhibition of exhibitions.
Atul Dodiya’s black and white canvases are stretching towards the territory of Parthiv Shah’s black and white photographs where he chronicles the everyday life of M. F. Husain. There is a very endearing photograph in which Husain is lying down on his back with outstretched arms on the floor of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi where he is imitating the pose of a similar figure in the Husain painting just above the reclining Husain figure on the floor. It is just a moment where photography as a medium takes over the painter and the painting through the principle of juxtaposition and the dialectics of which the photographic frame is capable. But the exhibition is not just focused on the indexicality of photography as there are galleries committed to photograms or camera-less photography, such as contact prints or the direct exposure of photo-emulsion paper to light which were exercises in Indian modernity with the photographic surface, almost half a century after Man Ray’s experiments with Rayographs. The vector geometric forms that constitute the content of these photograms are in direct conversation with another gallery of Akbar Padamsee’s experimental film Syzygy (1970) which was a stop motion animation film composed of vector geometric forms that composed the gestalt of various figure and ground relationships.
While the gestalt of the figure and ground relationships are relayed across animations and photograms, there is another layer in the exhibition, like an outer skin, but it is in the form of bones. Jitish Kallat’s fiberglass sculpture of the skeleton of an automobile, is there as one of the outermost layers in the seven exhibitions. And it was timely, that this Kallat automobile skeleton appeared in KNMA, shortly after the retrospective Jitish Kallat opening at NGMA in January 2017. At NGMA, Jaipur House, there was another automobile skeleton of an oil truck, as one of the hundred artworks at display in the retrospective of this 42 year old artist. By purposefully choosing a Kallat trademark work of the automobile skeleton, the curator Roobina Karode is forging a hyperlink with what is latest on view in the national modern gallery, and thus creating a full circle between the architectural modern towards the symbolic homology of modern institutional architecture.