Art: Karma Tenrab ~ the eternal seeker

(I wrote this catalogue essay for a solo show by Karma Tenrab at the Mahua gallery, Bangalore, in 2003)

 

WHAT are the footsteps of life about? Perhaps a search for quintessence. Of journeys, of destinations, both of the soul and the body. Of the eternal quest for the deep silence within. Of living in the moment.

Each religion embodies tenets of these positive energies, the dharmic pathways to personal renaissance. In today’s fragmented, embattled world, it is not surprising that Sikkim-born Karma Tenrab has chosen to enshrine the ways of the Buddha, the sanctuary at his lotus feet, through these serene, faith-led acrylic and oil paintings, a far cry from his earlier abstract works.

To the artist, at 27, his images couch the Savakabuddhas (Pali), the enlightened disciples who gain nirvana by learning of dharma from a Samyakshambuddha, who embodies correct and harmonious knowledge.

Karma’s images, steeped in pilgrimage and nascent learning, lure the viewer towards an inner light. Towards the true pulse of living, away from egocentric achievement and materialism. Towards being an eternal child of light.  Or following the eight-fold Buddhist path of enlightenment, embracing meditative, introspective and life-affirming practices.     

On these large canvases, Karma raises a tumult of questions. About life. About belonging. About being.

Was the Buddha one, or many? Is the latent divine being within us like a dead tree that is waiting to bloom once more? Can listening to the silence imbue each moment with meaning? Does the quest for infinite truth illuminate the seeker from within? Can one walk on the true path with worldly strings attached? If we control our emotions, can we morph into new age Enlightened Ones? Do we constantly erect barricades around us that distance us from the truth?

These potent yet poetic artistic meditations with flat, unicolour backgrounds may seem intriguing in one so young. What triggered them? Some cues emerge from Karma’s jottings for his first solo show – ‘The Sacred Space’ – in New Delhi in February 2007, and from a December 2007 telephone conversation from near Belgaum.

As from a misty Sikkim inscape, Karma emerges by slow degrees. As a Gangtok schoolboy of three or four, whose playmates were the child monks from the Rumtek, Tsuklakhang, and Enchey gompas or monasteries. As a teenaged student, clad in a traditional baku, who attended twice-a-week thangka painting classes at the Enchey School. As the child of parents who were committed to education, a son whose joy was to sketch and paint all day. As a student of electronics and telecommunication at the Sikkim Manipal University for a two brief years, where the walls and fans of his hostel room bore testimony to his creative urge. And so, down a long and winding route, he found himself at the famed art school at Baroda.       

In November 2002, Karma set out in search of himself. He left art school. He ‘took refuge’ with Bod Rinpoche, and did a pilgrimage to six holy sites, including Bodh Gaya, Rajgir, Nalanda and Kushinagar.

This resulted in an earlier series of black-and-white acrylic canvases on Buddhist themes. But their iconography is individual. They do not hark back to the classic cave paintings of Ajanta or the perfectly-proportioned massive sculpted figures at Ellora. Nor to the aniconic representations of Amravathi. Or even the anthropomorphic representations at Gandhara, with their Greco-Buddhist syncretism, or the art at Mathura, which traced a common lineage under the Kushan rulers. Idealizing the realistic, these images fused the immediately human with divine serenity.

Karma’s influences could derive from an eastern curve, along the Silk Road though the northern Mahayana route that traversed Central Asia, Tibet, Bhutan, China, Korea and Japan. Or the southern Theravada route through Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Celebrations of local-impacted Buddhist iconography are spectacular for both their range and their execution. Take the now-destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas. Or the Cambodian temple complex at Angkor Wat. Or the geometrical, almost abstract figures from the 13^th century Thai ethnic kingdom of Sukhothai, followed by the sumptuous garments and jeweled ornamentation of the Bodhisattvas in the gilded temples of the Ayutthaya period that followed. Or the magnificence of the Borobudur temple in Indonesia, built around 780-850 AD.

It is against this backdrop of Asian traditions that Karma’s paintings must be scanned. Does he trace his lineage directly from traditional thangka paintings? Or the secret significance of the mandala? Or a luminous descent from the Bodhisattvas? Or the untraced stories embodied within stupas at Sanchi? Or the serene, healing smile of the Dalai Lama, still positive in exile?

Karma’s colour-controlled, monotheistic renditions are impelled by light. By the grace that underlies a search for the divine. By glancing back over his shoulder at the gompas of Sikkim, their fluttering prayer flags and wheels, the chants that pulse through the cool air. By an awareness of all the Buddhist iconography that has guided him to the present state. By contemporary media that make for greater permanence, such as acrylic.  

Acrylic on canvas, 42x42 inches.

“What Buddha means to me is beyond fascination. That’s where I would wish to take anyone who would see this exhibition. Not a mere display of content we are familiar with, but rather a feeling that is evoked by coming across anything that emanates that divine energy,” Karma wrote about his black-and-white acrylic canvases in early 2007.

In this series, he guides the viewer away from well-trodden paths. Towards a quasi-philosophical, semi-aesthetic lens on the Buddha. Towards questioning pathways to harmony, winding bylanes to asceticism, in a materialistic era. Towards art as a means of self-realization.

These are the most vital reasons to engage with Karma’s work. He may not strive towards the spareness of Zen, or the quicksilver essence of a haiku or Chinese calligraphy. But his paintings are deeply imbued with earnestness, with eternal seeking.

Namo buddham sharanam gacchami.

Namo dharmam sharanam gacchami.

Namo sangham sharanam gacchami.   

Art: Sacred Spaces ~ abstracts by Shivani Dugar

'Midst': 22 x 42 in. each, Oil on linen canvas

(I wrote this catalogue essay on Shivani's abstract paintings for the Mahua Gallery, Bangalore, in 2009)

Still centre of the unknown

(An encounter with the abstract paintings of Shivani Dugar)

  

Abstract paintings are fictitious models because they visualize a reality which we can neither see nor describe but which we may nevertheless conclude exists.

                                                                                                      ~ Gerhard Richter

There is a sense of atmosphere, there is an approximation of music and, what is most important, there is a throbbing mystery about the very process of viewing and responding as if one is sucked into some still centre of hitherto unknown experience.

                                                ~ R.L. Bartholomew on V.S. Gaitonde’s abstract paintings

Abstraction in art often seems inexplicable. Or permeated by an unimaginable secret code. It seems ever-changing, like wispy clouds that morph and waft and vanish into forever. Or the surge in the depths of an indigo vat. Perhaps like the drifting icebergs off Antarctica that seem of the southern continent, yet above and beyond it. Like the chattering of squirrels, a twittering of birds in a cherry tree outside a bay window, unfathomable to the lay ear, yet cogent within its world.

This intrinsic subtext imbues the paintings of artists who veer away from the tried, the tested, the tangible. They brush past the figurative, the immediately cognizable, the near-photographic modes of representation. Instead, their outward expressions delve into their innermost chambers, where thought and emotion integrate into a terrain that changes colour and pulse with the moodiness of inner Ladakh landscapes. Such creative spirits take the viewer on a near-yogic journey into the sense of essence, the breadth of breath, the calm core within infinite flux.

Shivani Dugar’s passage to light, to the realization of her own artistic pulse, turns more than a sidelong glance at Richter and Gaitonde, at their mastery of the metier. For her oils on canvas today have emerged as meditations on nature, as wordless paeans to the beautiful unsung, to its unnamed hues, its intrinsic moods, vistas, melodies.

Her landscapes travel deep, into silences beyond forms and themes, bounding over mountains and rivers, seascapes and ocean drifts, the legacy of leaves, stem and bark, the loamy-sandy history of soil. She chooses hues that have yet to be named, terrain yet unrecognized, almost inter-galactic interstices, yet serenely poised within its own certainty.   

Shivani’s certainty has been sculpted by her artistic explorations. For instance, by watching her mother paint at home, by imbibing her spiritual inclinations, the meditative chakras as visualized through landscapes – where, for instance, red embodies the earth, orange the water, green the air, purple stands for space, and so on.

Her galvanic change from within became an electrifying force when she relocated to New York City, where she did a Master’s in printmaking at the Pratt Institute. Shivani was drawn into the whirlpool of the art, its cross-hatching, its intricate linear passages, the gentle planar quality of lithography, the uncertainty that was built into the practice. She learnt to eschew the decorative for muted innate expressions. She veered away from architectural forms to paint from feeling while engaging with natural planes and spatial relationships.

En route, Shivani sought to express the awesome magnitude of landscapes, but in an individual, unconventional way. She would mull over Gaitonde’s paintings, seek out their infinite communication through an indecipherable code. Equally, she delved into the world of Richter, his multi-track evolution, his nuanced questionings, his breakaway forays from photo-paintings into abstraction. That led her to other voices with similar souls, like Somenath Maity. Or the UK-based magic realism, the chimerical qualities of Canada-born Peter Doig, who often pays tribute to Le Corbusier.

         Her art is deeply rooted in reminiscence, but not for the immediate past or for distant dreams. Instead, her yearnings stem from nature. Her canvases gaze inwards at an atavistic past, at omnipresence on a solular journey centuries ago, at meditation on transience, even on inner certitude. 

Detail from 'Search': 40x40 in, oil on linen canvas

        Shivani’s moods, once abstracted, reflect those of the seashell that sings of an inner surge, of the butterfly bound for the cloud on horizon, of the blue beetle that claims the clinging vine as home. She expresses nishabd or the voiceless through banded, ever-layered hues, through prismatic seeings into the unseen.

        Light imbues her delving into the darkness, almost like a deep sea diver in search of the rarest of pearls. But unlike that simplest of passages, Shivani’s ebb and surge, quietitude and implosions, take the viewer back to a classic Indian concept: that of the trinity of the deities Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu, who represent creation, dissolution and regeneration.  

      Distilling essences seems to be Shivani’s forte. Like her illustrious predecessors in abstract art, she evokes the transcendental, the timeless, the contemplative and the poetic. Amidst these trajectories, she binds yet unwinds the flexi-connections between the earth and the sky, the rocks and the ripples, the space and the sea, the sunset and the moonbeam, the inner quiet and the outer retort. For can these ever be expressed in word or photograph, on stage or on screen? Perhaps not. For only painted abstractions or soaring music can do them justice.

       This truth has been proved before by art stalwarts like Anselm Kiefer and Achuthan Kudallur, Jackson Pollock and Nasreen Mohamedi, Sam Francis and Viswanadhan V.. Perhaps Shivani feels in sync with what Pollock once said of his experience: “When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.” And maybe she connects as easily with Kiefer's words: “All painting but also all literature...is merely a process of going round and round something inexpressible...”

      It is the inexpressible moment that Shivani expresses through her broad strokes, her inner gaze. She is in her paintings, as much as of them, and yet a meditative detachment steeps through them. She participates and alters, visualizes and demystifies, allowing the intuitive impulse, the non-imagistic ground, the overlayers of pulse on the serene first coat, to break free, to breathe, even to just be.

     For, to Shivani, her abstract landscapes are often about air, fire, earth, water, and space, essentially “their depths, emotions, moods, the warmth, the coolness, the movements, the drama, the unseen,” as she couches it in words. Her textures and tones hint at the unheard, the unseen, the untouched.

    Shivani’s intent remains both subliminal yet spirited, with spirituality at its core. Submerged within, subsumed by natural abeyance, her intelligence grapples with the moment with intensity yet respect, with both bhakti and shringara, resulting in cadences that speak with the rasa of Odissi, the unheard notes of the shehnai, and the thunder of a waterfall, all intermingled in a moment. Perhaps that is her fiction, her reality, the call to her persona from the still centre of the unknown.

       

           

  

 

Art: Gestures Speak ~ an essay on M. Shanthamani's art, 2007

Gestures Speak:

a one-off take on Brand Bangalore

 

A CITY. A map. A reckoning of the past, present and future. Each can be read, deciphered, decoded by a sensitized individual ~ with as much insight and intuition as a palmist reads the tracery on the soft inner spread of a hand.

The hand, thus visualized, can evoke an individual within a city, a country, a globe. It can trace the trajectory of a human being, an artist, a poet, an architect, often tantalizingly on a parallel track to a city like Bangalore. M. Shanthamani’s current show ~ titled Gestures Speak ~ brings this home conceptually and visually, pregnant with layered significance.

On her large, brooding acrylic canvases, the local and the global, the insider and the outsider battle, collide and jostle for co-existence, defragmenting life cycles and existential notions long imbued with history by association with the onlooker and the activist alike.   

Shanthamani’s stances stem from her multiplicity of experiences as a rural-born individual, now an urban being. As a young woman who made the transition in 1992 from the arts schools of Mysore and Baroda to a burgeoning, IT-propelled Bangalore. As a girl rooted in the rustic soil outside Mysore, warding off suitable matches as a pre-teen, able to identify with the indomitable womenfolk who cared for their households and 30 cattle, toiled in the fields, committed to life in a deep, essential sense. As a questing mind enriched by the company of strong, emancipated woman artists. Even as an artist who once couched herself thus:

“Painting became an important space for me to get out of all this. It gave me freedom ~ physically, mentally, financially. My canvas is now a surface that constantly questions and looks for answers in that space.”

 

Shanthamani’s questions on Greater Bangalore, even as Bengalooru, are imbued with reflections from her journey into the future. To her, it matters that the Garden City is now almost invisible ~ cloaked in dense vehicular pollution that chokes plant and human life alike. And that the genteel norms that governed the pensioner’s paradise have been overtaken by a high-speed youth-centric buzz, as set-back bungalows are gobbled up by high-rises blocks, gated communities, and malls. Even the fact that the silk-weavers of the old city have vanished as big brands lure the new, well-heeled customer with global mantras.

Is the constantly-morphing city redefining who we are? Is technology creating a rift between those with insider information, and the tech-deprived? Are our bodies changing as shrinking city spaces crowd us into personal cocoons not of our making? Perhaps. Through giant acrylic canvases melded with stencilled photo-verity images, water colours and body/ hand casts, Shanthamani creates parallel city narratives. Of the migrant street woman who vends mallige flowers. Or the labourers who shape the new city. All those unknown, unseen, unsung stories beyond the hype. Those women who also work round-the-clock, expressing themselves through their working hands, their inherited classical postures.

What does the hand stand for within the big frame, Shantamani wonders. In an age of body-shopping, has it become a mere appendage? Have we outsourced our bodies, our minds, our spirits, our culture, in the incessant 24/7/365 rat-race that is the new face of our globalized city?

 

These issues are the raison d’etre of Gestures Speak, contextualizing the individual within the city. As we celebrate the economic boom, are we neglecting a vital angle ~ that former strategic colonial pawns today provide cheap brainpower to big first-world players? Why is IT the most visible face of Bangalore today? Within the multinational marketplace, have we been reduced to invisible working hands, shadowy presences often unacknowledged?

Questions of identity surge beneath the rippled cityscape. Is Bangalore in danger of losing its past inheritance as it speeds towards modernization and westernization? Why does it so seldom glance back at the riches that migrants have brought into its cosmopolitan domain over the past 350 years, including their living skills, rituals, crafts, cuisines and languages? Such as the Tigalas from Tamil Nadu who set up Lalbagh for Haider Ali, the Devangas from Andhra Pradesh at the heart of the silk industry, the Bengali karigars who are the mainstay of gold craft. Or even the Anglo-Indians, the cantonment culture, and missionary schools at the core of the city’s skill in a global tongue now outsourced. Or the brilliant scientists who were behind the Bangalore torpedo or India’s first indigenous helicopter.  

Other facts, other faces, call for equal attention. On an average, over 2,500 white-collar IT workers, often with partners in the same industry, have flocked to Bangalore every month since the early Nineties. This youth brigade, often dubbed Gen-Next by the media, heralds new consumer trends, crisscrossing culture, food and housing, bypassing traditions and local habits. Their lifestyles are buttressed by invisible lives ~ those of construction labourers from north Karnataka and Tamilnadu, carpenters from Kerala, Rajasthan and Bihar, and marble workers from Rajasthan and UP. These migrants, of a transient mindset, identify with little of Bangalore’s culture. Are they a malaise or migratory beings of benefit to the city, whose population has multiplied five-fold in just a decade-plus? How do these citizens identify with Kempe Gowda or the Roman coins once found in the Cauvery?  

Shanthamani brings her concentrated gaze to bear on these inner city issues in Gestures Speak. Migrant-centric lives need multiple narratives within a city that lives in different time zones simultaneously. Within the digital landscape, the hand has assumed the role of a giant cultural element. Growing beyond her earlier conceptual and metaphorical work, facts and human stories assume a new centrality. For instance, the fact that in 2004, Bangalore’s 200,000 textile workers contributed approximately a tenth of India’s textile exports of $13.5 billion. The tension between these cities, old and new, underline her explorations. 

Beyond these conflicting cities, past cultural nuances and social conditioning, she once observed, “At Baroda, I realized I was a very tactile person. My central reference point is always my body. I believe in doing things with my hands. I want to project myself as a worker, maybe a painting worker. I like to smear paint with my hands, mould things.”

The body, a central metaphor in Shanthamani’s often-autobiographical work, is here symbolically the hand, representing the many Bangaloreans who seem misplaced, not recognized by global perceptions of the city in transition. The layered myth-making continues.

Her acrylic diptychs and triptychs, often billboard-like, evoke the new affluence of glass and metal-facade towers, but question why those who build these faceless, overnight cities, identified perhaps by a barcode, are invisible. They summon up the ravages of cultural imperialism in an age of pixellation, when we allow a Bamiyan Buddha to be blown up without global protest because we imagine we have the power to create. Through buttons that spell: Stop. Pause. Rewind. Save. Trash.

What would we trash in an era when every brown-skinned worker is first regarded as either a wannabe terrorist or a cyber coolie? Drawing on her experiences during a papermaking workshop in Glasgow with British expert Jacky Parry in 2004, Shanthamani self-reflects on identity and belonging, negotiating contemporary art practice.

Veering between the literal and the symbolic, she invokes the giant creator’s hand from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, looming over call centres, their staff caught in the cross-hairs of cultural conflict. Against a landscape of beeping electronic pulses, hands as huge as an adult human being foreground a question: have we lost our memory of agricultural origins? A yoga-centric canvas, dotted with stick figure asanas suggesting inner calm, subverts the inner resonance with the intrusion of  itinerant child jugglers/ acrobats who today perform for a living at traffic lights.

The series, eclectic in its inspiration, draws on sources as varied as John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero,’ Nina Simone’s soul-rich ‘Four Women, brilliant black-and-white industrial photographs by economist-turned-photographer Sebastiao Salgado, even encounters with dynamic young women from Canada, Norway and Ireland during the Parry stint. Like Salgado, Shanthamani interrogates the eroded status of the manual worker in our age of technology.

Mating with, often masking, text with colour, connecting with her earlier painterly and pictorial work, Shanthamani couches her overview thus: “I’m talking about being reduced to a pair of hands, constantly working for economic reasons since your product is removed from personal, cultural and spiritual moorings. We’ve become a cheap market product to use and throw.  But even cheap labour consumes all that their money can buy – including cheap microchips or pirated products. Within our city, everything is for sale, and everyone is a slave. We’re removed from living. We now have only two mantras: Work and Money.”

 Rhetorically, even ironically, Shanthamani adds: “Is Bangalore, then, really an urban space? Or a mere conglomeration of overgrown villages? Let’s face it. Even an IT guy here is not known because he’s a great programmer, but because of his willingness to work 14 hours a day. As a result, so much is being sidelined, like our crafts traditions. The city’s only focus is on construction labour or software labour. I’m consciously trying to accept that I’m a painting labourer.”

Like her earlier shows in 1994 and 1996, the artist as migrant continues to react to Bangalore, to its manmade objects, its creation of urban waste, its loss of human touch. Have people become mere objects en route to the time of the cyborgs?

Shanthamani’s identity reasserts itself as she opts to paint once more. She highlights almost iconic Indian gestures: the hand in meditation, mudras, the outstretched palm that begs. Her choices are buoyed by an almost atavistic consciousness. She asks, “Painting as a human skill is losing ground in the face of technology. It was important for me to paint these working hands within the context of Bangalore. But I did question whether I’m painting photo-realistically, or whether these works were a collage. To me, technology can never be a solution to sweat, hunger and pain. How can it replace basic urges like wanting to play with colours or indulging in rituals that soothe?”

Perhaps her most rooted work in the series is a woven tapestry embroidered with the words, ‘Made in India,’ a label often exported to the first world. An intermediate space where Indians hire out the cheap hand skills that the west has lost to industrialization.

To Shanthamani, it matters how her body is read by the world at large. Or how she is often viewed as an aspiring immigrant while in the first world, threading through her layered engagements with Indian life in flux. 

She reiterates: “Gestures Speak is not about opposing growth. It’s about recognizing what’s happening, placing myself within it, hanging onto what I hold dear…”

Finally, the viewer and the artist revisit the crux of the interchange. In the age of the cyborg and the cyber coolie, they examine the sites of human endeavour through the lens of history. In our context, within our city, do our gestures speak? Or are they symbolic of mere tokenism that so marks our place in the globalized world? Each hand could change the course of this great charge forward into the unknown. And thus, the lifeline of Bangalore as we interpret it today. 

 (This essay was originally commissioned by Gallery Sumukha, Bangalore, in 2007)