Exhibition curator Gayatri Sinha is well known in India for organizing conceptually driven group shows, and her latest effort is no exception. With a diverse group of artists, she sets her sights on the question of beauty’s manipulation and the exercise of power implicit therein. Bharti Kher needs little prodding to explore the dark side of loveliness. Her And All the While the Benevolent Slept (all works 2008) makes oblique reference to Tantric iconography with an ash-black decapitated female nude that squats on a phallic rod over a rough-cut stump of wood. Abir Karmakar answers the challenge by eschewing his usual fleshily transgressive male nudes; instead, he offers several “Barodians,” a series of photorealist portraits of blank-eyed shop mannequins dressed in accoutrements that point to the consumerist aspirations of middle-class India. Elsewhere, Mithu Sen’s It is not a very important life . . . impresses with pillars of gauze ascending like phantoms over reliquary light boxes and delicate nests of hair and bone. Works by Anant Joshi also stand out, namely an untitled series of orgiastic mash-ups of colorful, half-melted superhero toys, squished together, eviscerated, and then pinned to the wall with screws. Other pieces—Shukla Sawant’s The Sweet Life and Bose Krishnamachari’s Amuseum/Ghost, for example—seem less directly engaged with Sinha’s curatorial vision. But the exhibition coheres, for the most part, with ambitious new works by a group of fourteen contemporary artists, poised at unsettling angles to canons of conventional beauty.
