It is very facile to dismiss Rummana Hussain’s Installations and Paintings ‘Multiples and Fragments’ at the LTG Gallery as a pretentious set of Emperor’s clothes. Exhibits like a teenage bicycle with its rotating wheels (thanks to a battery), not quite on cloud nine, but embarrassed to come down a little and move forward on the mud track laid before it, and most of the everyday metallic or terracotta artefacts are reflected or refracted in mirrors strategically placed beyond them into myriad angles and fragments, and the impacts is stunning.
There is no attempt to side track or pull a fast one like her famous namesake in the Theatre of the Absurd. If an exhibit is visually humdrum (‘Indigo’: crumpled paper in indigo and blue, strung up on a clothes line), it is cerebrally striking in recalling the slavery of indigo plantations decades ago. This dichotomy in the display has to be worked out by the viewer and this can be fun. And in the game, familiarity must not lead to contempt!
These is a touch of deception in that a wholly familiar object of thing leads the viewer to a totally unfamiliar phenomenon. Indigo is certainly a case in point. Rommano’s “narrow domestic wall” have been torn down to give place to magnificent “Multiples and Fragments” that evoke many splendoured ideas and visual images. “Unearthed” (terracotta pot, burnt-wood and bricks), “Resonance” (acrylic sheets, mirror, terracotta plants, sand shell, rock and water), “Electric Womb” (acrylic sheet, electric light and plastic tubes) need to be seen at least once. So also the 24 exhibits on show. Albeit a little aggressively, Rommano reasserts that beauty and aesthetics lie in the eyes of the beholder and a ‘silk’ purse can be women out of a sow’s ear!
LIGHT AND SHADOW: Like Rommano Hussain’s Installations, Subachan Yadav’s play with ambivalent forms of lights and shadow in his current exhibitions at the Shridharani Art Gallery (as part of a group show), keeps the grey cells on its artistic toes! Pretention? Hoax? Gimmick? Like the camera eye, a closer look from many sides dismisses such thoughts especially after a closer look at Mother and Child!
There is no form that is explicit;no fresh colouring that heralds happenings. Yet a hint, a suggestion and a new world opens up! “Two friends”, ‘a man and a woman’, ‘a mother and child’. Qualified n art from the Benares Hindu University, Subachan has marked out a new path of rare techniques and has sustained a consistent standards of suggestive art. Snow flakes further powdered and mixed in ink and sprayed into ambivalent forms.