My first foray into contemporary Indian art, curating Ratnadeep’s exhibition has been immensely fullfilling. The works render themselves to such multitudionous readings that each encounter continues to ‘haunt’ but also perplex. Below is an extract from my curatorial introduction to the exhibition:
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Writing across the figurative expressions of the avant garde or defining moments from history or history of art for one frame juxtaposed against a second frame which illustrates a political or sociocultural episode from world history, it is not easy to locate the work of Ratnadeep Gopal Adivrekar within the seemingly established contours of intellectual and artistic work emerging from non-territorial Mumbai. From his first solo exhibition Memoirs of the Unreal City (1997), his oeuvre spans a broad “culturalist” perspective, including philosophical work on exposing the constructed nature of postcolonial identities and the cultural effects and affects of the unconscious. In his most recent series, Ratnadeep extends this intellectual commitment further with fervent paintings which represent a part re-working of the diptych, but also as an intensely symbolic interactive play which deploys everyday proverbs as strategically inventive bases setting off a complex play of encoding and decoding between the artist’s own conception of the proverbs and its visual translations on the canvas. The encounter between audience, space and artwork becomes mitigated by each new frame which is only but a device to encode the meaning of the other.
Compositionally, the 18 oil paintings, produced in 2007, appear like reinventions of the diptych. The artist juxtaposes two independent scenes within a single canvas. The neat framing of each scene gives the canvas the appearance of a diptych as opposed to a “collage”. The two neatly demarcated visual frames, characteristic of this series, become crucial devices for understanding the accompanying proverbs/text which form staging points for meaning-making. Apart from this, the exhibition also attempts to dwell into the Mumbai Contemporary Art context itself with specific reference to the 90s generation of artist who emerged from the J.J. School of Arts.
For more details see:
Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, “Proverbial In(ter)ventions: In Dialogue with Ratnadeep Gopal Adivrekar” in Proverbial In(ter)ventions: Ratnadeep Gopal Adivrekar, Exhibition Catalogue, Singapore: NUS Museum, 2009.
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