I always suspected that the city was a falsification. But it was only on a foggy afternoon in early spring, when the air smells of atarch, that I discovered the nature of the fraud. We are living inside a cupboard, in the lowest depths of oblivion, among broken poles and shut boxes...” <P align="right> — Zbigniew Herbert, The Collected Poems
Two years in the making, but springing like hope — and ironically also as a reflection of more buoyant times — Retrieval Systems casts back to memory in the age of electronic data storage. Technology makes some things easier but every memory remains individual, sometimes bruised, at other times evangelical, but always intimate. Threaded together by curator Ranjit Hoskote for Art Alive Gallery, the show (on at India Habitat Centre till this weekend, and at the gallery thereafter) brings together five disparate artists and Hoskote’s “preoccupation with memory: as the ground for selfhood, as a resource for art, as incarnate in the form of a library, an archive, a folklore, a mythology, or an environment encrypted with the traces of habit and custom”.
A day before the show is to open, there is ordered chaos in the gallery. Artists Baiju Parthan and Manjunath Kamath are attending to their displays, more concerned with the here and present than the curatorial brief regarding the “archives of memory” that “reference and sustain the contemporary artistic imagination”. The triggers of our imagination are voyeuristic, almost, nurtured by smells and visuals and feel and touch, a collective consciousness that threads out into the slenderness of self. But in this, the age of Facebook and Twitter, do they have any relevance?
Kamath, whose “To be continued” might be the focus of attention at the show, is explicit in his use of “several elements from the family albums”, especially with regard to the use of technology in his works, but also insists that “Wooden furniture is an emblem of family wealth” something that “museumises memories”. Surprisingly, Parthan says he references memories only to “something that we are losing, or have lost” as a process of accelerating into the future. In his conversation with Hoskote, he says, “For instance, as we settle into the informational space for our everyday social, economic and educational transactions, we end up relying on the search engine almost like a prosthetic extension for finding our way around. I do believe that, in this process, we are gradually contributing to the atrophy of our memory faculty.” The horrifying result? “A world structured on amnesia”, he says, that “would be a jungle operating on the principle of brute survival”.
Parthan’s own trigger, for the purpose of this exhibition, is the Indo-Iberia culture of Goa and the statue of Abbe Faria, but it is Mumbai photographer Alex Fernandes who takes on the documentation if not of Goa then at least of its people, in formal, posed portraits, not without a hint even of irony, certainly of humour, which he calls, even if politically incorrectly, as the “race mind and racial consciousness”.
For G R Iranna, whose monumental sculptural works are like exclamation points in the exhibition, his attempt as an artist, he says, has been to observe the newness or freshness of a child’s first experience of everything. “But this has nothing to do with reviving old traditions. I am re-using old materials, releasing energies that are still held inside them. I am not going back to the past, I am carrying these materials and images into the future — represented by silent bells, a Buddha asleep on a pile of steel trunks, a catamaran taken apart and pieced together...
In what Hoskote refers to as her zip files, Tina Bopiah confesses to find herself inhabiting “the dark regions that I paint”, at least partly coloured by “Catholicism drummed into us in childhood”, an “indoctrination at school [that] found no cogent explanation through reasoning”. Yet, “in the act of creating, I have often found it very useful to dredge these demons up and deal with them in the act of purgation”, but still she would not erase memory for “though it raises the possibility of creating various personae for ourselves” it would also erase any references, which alone, she admits, makes it “inconceivable”.
