Espace Claude Berri, founded recently by the eponymous French film director and art collector, rides the wave of interest in contemporary Indian art with the bluntly titled group exhibition “Indian Focus.” The common denominator of the works on view is the antagonism between tradition and modernity, manifested by the coexistence of multiple senses of time, classes, and belief systems. Hema Upadhyay’s Lilliputian installation Dream a wish, wish a dream, 2006, which depicts Mumbai, the city that contains Asia’s biggest slum, gives evidence of the double condition of metastasizing towns: chaos and inventiveness. A similarly ambivalent attitude toward the effects of globalization can be found in Rina Banerjee’s Tropicalization of Nature, Henry Rousseau Restraint, 2007, a mesmerizing hodgepodge of lightbulbs, dry gourd shells, fans, strings, sticks, wire, and horns. A small altarpiece depicting the goddess of nativity with an upside-down globe in one hand and the other outstretched, all while balancing on a sphere made of medication bottles, is less discreet about Banerjee’s stance.
The entire show oscillates between a direct play with cultural stereotypes and a sophisticated critique of this very play. Subodh Gupta’s Black Thing, 2007, made of thousands of black aluminum tongs, refers to the lowest caste system in Indian society, the so-called untouchables, but functions more like an untouchable object of desire. Bharti Kher’s pointillistic redeployment of the bindi dot—the all-seeing eye of wisdom that has come to symbolize the eye for fashion—appears on perhaps the most sacred object of our times, the mirror. Put together, the works seem to announce an aesthetic that sees cultural translation as its highest imperative and modernist principles as a treacherous yet desirable way to achieve such effects. “Indian Focus” is a clever demonstration of how to engage self-consciously with such precarious inventions as the “national art scene.”
