- Venue
- Serpentine Gallery
- Location
- United Kingdom
A dulled sky, barren winter trees attempting to mask passing polluting automobiles, grass trimmed immaculately, and a machine laid, concrete snaked path leads to the glass doorway of the Serpentine Gallery. As you enter the enclosure, the world of controlled nature disintegrates into white walls, a white ceiling and a second gateway leading to the Indian Highway. On your left hand side you experience a series of direct images, which capture colour, light and texture that welcome and envelope their viewer into one’s world of India. Cenotaph, (A deed of transfer) 2007, created by Jitish Kallat, are impressionistic images of selected, exterior walls of buildings residing in the streets of Mumbai. Here, the artists’ region of childhood is visually layered in a ‘brick and mortar’ design, representing a wall of walls – a display of boundaries. As you continue on the ‘Indian Highway’, you make a left in order to enter the ‘Dream Villa’- a panoramic urban landscape photographed by artist Dayanita Singh in 2008. The road unfolds on your right hand side. You stumble into a room containing the remnants of furniture and leftover luggage found on the side of an Indian Highway, which have been reassembled and displayed as a form of cherished memorabilia by artist, and apparent collector, Ravi Agarwal.Journeying through the next exhibiting space, you are met by films on small screens attached to the walls. These short movies of about 4-6 minutes length are interactive for individual viewers and therefore, create a waiting list of those wishing to experience their content. This element makes the films personal but fairly inaccessible to the wanderers of the gallery. However, the moving images create a trail into a confined space consisting of ladders, flat screen televisions and shifting projections composed by Shilpa Gupta. Each film conveys a different aspect of India, referring to religion, tourism, industrialisation and environment. As you gaze from one screen to the next, you experience the contrast of nature’s beauty, depicted by still or rushing water, mountains of solitude, civilians and stretches of land, juxtaposed to the imposing world of mechanical monsters producing smoke from factories, as well as the noise pollution encouraged by aeroplanes and trains. One particularly captivating expression in this room was that of a tale of two lovers’ exploration of the country. A most powerful statement was quoted in this clip, ‘In an expedition of a goal reached, temptation can be taken further’. This can be interpreted through both natural and industrial aspects of the footage as – all things being limitless.Rolling out into a light and airy quad, overcast with murals and a display of rusted barrels which have successfully been pulled together to build a fort, you slip into a dark area cryptically veiled by a blackened curtain. Through the drapery there is a room consisting of eight screens revealing footage called ‘The Lightning Testimonies (2007)’ by Amar Kanwar. The film begins with environmental images of India and then evolves into eight different tales of women and families who have suffered the loss of beloved females due to the corruption and power hungry men of the Indian Army. The nature conveyed is of sparrows, dragonflies, rain, colourful flowers, which are all symbolic of fragility, beauty and life, which are all ‘acceptable’ aspects of the divine feminine. However, other clips of the film contrast, as they forcefully expose the burden of women, their rights and their respect, an example of which is of a protest of nude females running with rage in their eyes and screaming at the top of their lungs outside an authoritarian establishment. They call out for justice, ‘Even amongst animals the female is not forced ….you rape us, kill us, flesh us’. This film expresses the desperation for change which has not been heard by those it does not suit. It is an emotional and daunting experience to observe this piece, which is what makes its statement so potent and should therefore, not be missed.Another projection, viewed at the Tate Britain’s Turner Prize 2008, of Runa Islam’s ‘First Day of Spring’, has a commonality to ‘The Lightening Testimonies’. This piece reveals an important statement with regards to the manner in which Eastern culture and civilians are perceived by the Western world. The subjects that are emphasised include snapshots of the faces of unperturbed eastern men waiting for work, conveying pensive thought, perversion, confusion and melancholic gazes. However, the intensity of the statement is encapsulated through a slow camera movement, which dedicates concentrated time to the beauty of the environment in the set and the poses of the subdued yet shady male characters.Overall, this exhibition appears to be in keeping with a currently fashionable theme; being the corruption and dehumanisation occurring in India even in the 21st century. A film that has been recently released, named ‘Slum dog Millionaire’, directed by Danny Boyle, explores similar exploitations of mankind in the East through creative cinematography. Therefore, there is an apparent cry for aid which should be paid attention to through both cynical and empathetic eyes. Indian Highway is a growing, and soon to be travelling success, due to political and religious criticisms, as well as, aspects of the human rights awareness attached to the emotive and detailed analyses conveyed through the works of these selected artists. According to the well known Indian poet, play write and essayist Rabindranath Tagore, ‘You can’t cross the ocean merely by standing and staring at the water’. It is possible to state that this previous quote reveals the true spirit of the artists protest – they are united as a collection of primary visions, which tell tales of their sadness in order to create a ship for the world to help their country to find a solution, perhaps to give branches of possibility to the straight and narrow highway.
