Modus Operandi: Making space for inspiration

An edited version of this was published in the Mumbai edition of Hindustan Times.

From a distance, the corner of the gallery that artist Mithu Sen has claimed as her own seems inviting. There’s a strip of pink running from ceiling to floor. A lamp hangs low, throwing light on a simple table that seems to have pink photo frames on it. Once you come closer, the work (titled “Permanent Past”) threatens to rejig your understanding of pink. Because this is not the colour of baby girls’ dresses, but a fleshy, gummy pink that’s shining as though slick with saliva. And then there are the teeth sticking out of that surface. As if that wasn’t creepy enough, you’ll find that between some of the awkwardly-embedded teeth are tiny human figures. Behind these modified photo frames are a set of tools and glass jars that contain powders as well as (presumably false) teeth. “Permanent Past” looks like you’ve entered the workspace of a demented tooth fairy rather than an artist, and this is a compliment. It’s not every day that an art work can fascinate and horrify you in equal measure.   

[image error][image error][image error][image error][image error]

Sen is one of the 20 artists who have taken over Chemould Prescott Road for an exhibition titled, Modus Operandi II; In-situ: An Artist’s Studio. The idea behind it is to allow viewers a glimpse of the processes that bring an art work to life. Some of the participating artists show you the books they’ve read and the objects that have inspired them. Others show you their tools. Some just show you their work, which make evident what ideas have driven the artists to make this particular work. Since the artists talk about their process either through the installation of the work or in the wall text, every work reveals something about how it was made.

Take, for example, the text explaining Kallat’s “Sighting – Gen – Mangifera – D17M6Y2018”: “The colour of the fruit as retinally perceive is its subtractive colour, after the surface has absorbed every other visible wavelength of light other than the colour that it reflects back to our retina. The lenticular reverses this hallucinatory experience through which we experience the world by making visible its very opposite…For Kallat, the fruit becomes a small doorway to deliberate upon its very energy, as an incarnation of this vital stellar power temporarily posing as a fruit, contemplating the macro as manifesting within the micro.”  

Lose the knotty polysyllables and translate to regular English, and you realise that the mango skin that you’ve always known to be a speckled orange contains multitudes. That’s what this lenticular print reveals as it shifts from the familiar orange to a cosmic blue.

Anant Joshi’s untitled installation may not reveal much about the process, but Joshi’s interest in how newspapers report stories is unmistakable since one part of the work is a collage of images taken from newspapers.

[image error][image error][image error][image error]

The black and white photographs have their share of smiling people, but there’s little good cheer in them. They’re representations of broken systems and despair that has become mundane. Not even the little square from a daily comic – most of them are frames from Calvin and Hobbes strips – lift the mood. If anything, they emphasise the grimness of this visual landscape. The collage is a background for a set of pigeonholes in which Joshi has placed 24 bronze sculptures. From the front, they look like plants or a melting candle or (if you’re feeling a fondness for Freud) misshapen phalluses. Look behind and each of these macabre faux toys has a wind-up key. There’s something particularly chilling about glimpsing the human faces through a grid of disfigured forms.  

Kulkarni’s space, on the other hand, has her tools, sketchbooks as well as bric-a-brac. It feels like a compact version of an actual studio.

[image error][image error][image error][image error][image error]

On the tabletops and walls are her powerful watercolours and sketches, celebrating the feminine body and attacking social conventions – like crossing one’s legs when seated – that seek to attach shame to feminine sexuality. The sketchbook is open to a page that shows an early sketch of what would end up being one of the fantastic sculptural installations that Kulkarni made Of Bodies, Armour and Cages (if you haven’t seen these, please Google right away). Below the art lie the tools of her trade, including a pot of Fevicol and a cheerful, plastic figurine of a little hula girl that offers a pointed contrast to the bodies in Kulkarni’s art.

Another generously open artist is Reena Saini Kallat, whose “Siamese Trees” are on display along with a desk piled with the wires and tools used to make these sculptures. Also on the desk are her sketches of the works and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees (an excellent book. Highly recommended if you haven’t read it).

[image error][image error][image error][image error][image error]

“Siamese Trees” is a series that I find both beautiful and uncomfortable at the same time. These sculptures look like human lungs and they’re also inverted trees, made of wires. Each tree is a hybrid of the national trees of two countries that share a border. Thailand’s ratchaphreuk and Cambodia’s palm come together to create the Rach-yra Palm. The American oak and Mexican cypress form the Cy-oak together. India’s banyan and Bangladesh’s mango make the Man-yan. North Korea’s pine fuses with South Korea’s hibiscus to create the Pine-iscus. The craft that has gone into making these pieces – the balance of colour, the use of the wire and the illusions of different kinds of texture – is magnificent. But there’s something inherently disturbing about plastic standing in for trees and lungs. Reena has used wires before, emphasising how they are devices used to separate as well as connect. In case of Siamese Trees, the wires are subtle reminders that trees do have their own way of communicating with one another through a underground network. But to me, it’s also a bit depressing that this vision of unity between countries in conflict is only possible as a plastic, artificial figment of the imagination.   

[image error][image error][image error][image error]

Atul Dodiya brings part of a shelf from his studio into the gallery, complete with books and kitschy sculptures (including a bust of Dr BR Ambedkar in a pink suit). Below this is a grid made up of his watercolours and framed stills showing villains and victims from old Bollywood films. The paintings are a study in vulnerability and body language. For example, the abject woman desperately holding on to the sari that a villain is pulling off her becomes a heroine in a balletic pose in Dodiya’s watercolour, which focuses on the lines of her form and removes details like the villain, the room and even the sari. 

Gattani’s abstract drawings are hung in a group, turning the wall into a collection of windows that look out onto a hazy cityscape. They’re actually meant to be non-representational studies inspired by stillness, but especially if you’ve been on the Bandra-Worli sea link on a cloudy, hazy day, it’s impossible to not think of our smothered city as you gaze upon Gattani’s drawings. Below the drawings are the tools that she uses to make these delicate works along with curled shavings of paper. Because that’s how these structures reveal themselves to Gattani – through the process of subtracting the paper using a surgical knife.

[image error][image error][image error]

As you wander around the hive of studios that Chemould Prescott Road has been transformed into for this exhibition, you may start seeing connections between works and artists. It’s like catching glimpses of the otherwise invisible threads of a spider’s web in sunlight. For instance, isn’t it odd that Jitish made a lenticular print of the mango while Reena used the mango tree for one of her Siamese Trees? Then there’s the visual resonance between the precise lines of Gattani’s abstract drawings and Tanujaa Rane’s almost-impossibly fine etchings. Seen individually, the pieces that make up one of Rane’s works would probably seem non-representational, but they come together like a sophisticated but simple jigsaw puzzle. You can’t help but remember the denture in Archana Hande’s installation when you see the teeth bared in Mithu Sen’s “Permanent Past”. Anju Dodiya and Varunika Saraf both share mood boards with viewers. The two boards are very different, but both artists are clearly fascinated by textures, fabric, different traditions of classical art and femininity. The found objects in Ritesh Meshram’s corner resonate with the objects that Bijoy Jain’s Studio has chosen to exhibit. All these objects urge the viewer to think of utility, construction and the artistic potential lurking within the functional and the mundane.    

[image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error]

(Left to right: Three exhibits from Bijoy Jain’s Studio; detail from Anju Dodiya’s mood board; detail from Anju Dodiya’s mood board; coral from Aditi Singh’s display; Aditi Singh’s display; detail from Varunika Saraf’s mood board; detail from Varunika Saraf’s mood board; pigments used in Varunika Saraf’s paintings; detail from “Thought Mala” by NS Harsha; detail from NS Harsha’s display; detail from Archana Hande’s display; tools of Lavanya Mani’s dyeing trade; detail from Tanujaa Rane’s display.)

Even if you’ve never heard of Aditi Singh, Anju or Atul Dodiya, Jitish Kallat, NS Harsha, Reena Saini Kallat, Shakuntala Kulkarni or Sheetal Gattani, Modus Operandi is a delight. With elements on display like a delicate fan of dried coral, pigments used to make a particular shade of colour, perfectly-made miniature bricks, a string of tiny heads and a newspaper clipping that asks if actor Biswajeet was a “master impregnator”, inspiration is revealed to a fabulous, varied business.

In a city of cramped homes and limited spaces, where we’ve made our peace with being uncomfortable, Modus Operandi is a reminder that while it may be ideal to have a room of one’s own, sometimes, just 1/20th of a gallery is enough to set your imagination free.