Joseph Stalin, a rubber horn, and a pig might seem like an incongruous mix. Yet K. M. Madhusudhanan pulled them all together in his sculpture Parade, 2016. By placing the erstwhile Soviet leader’s torso atop a creature whose name is a byword for greed and ignorance, the artist pulled down a onetime icon from his lofty pedestal. Parade is a three-dimensional rendition of an untitled 2016 charcoal drawing from Madhusudhanan’s ongoing series “The Marx Archive: Logic of Disappearance,” 2014–. In these works, five of which were on display, symbols of power from the Soviet era are depicted in a state of decline. The skeleton of a horse on a tank, dismembered mannequins, a muzzled dog on casters, and forlorn statues of former heroes serve to focus attention on the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it the failure of the great Marxist dream. Juxtaposed against an inky-black background, these surreal visitations seemed to glow with an inner luminosity. The treatment of these works is informed by the artist’s memories of childhood in the Indian coastal town of Alappuzha. “There is a lighthouse on the shores of my birthplace. These drawings have been created as image fragments made visible by its sweeping light.” There is a decidedly Foucauldian ring to these drawings, with the artist also paying homage to Goya’s black paintings and etchings, Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s movie Ajantrik (The Pathetic Fallacy, 1958), and Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1944 and 1958).

Rendered in a similar vein is the series “Penal Colony,” 2015–, which lent its name to the exhibition. The title evokes Kafka’s famous story about an instrument used to torture condemned prisoners. In one of the smaller format works in the series, a hand drill is suspended menacingly above an eye, while in another a fully armed soldier is perched on a skull. Torture as an instrument of power and even entertainment was a thread that ran through several other works in the show. The fiberglass work Tipu and the Mirror, 2016, was in effect a re-creation of the musical toy Tipu’s Tiger, one of the most popular objects in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Created in the late eighteenth century at the behest of Tipu Sultan, ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore, to express his hatred for the colonizing powers, it depicts a tiger mauling a British soldier. Elsewhere, a darkened room was lit by the mellow glow of seventy flickering electrical bulbs arranged in concentric circles above each other. Titled Rage, rage against the dying of the light, 2016, after a line from Dylan Thomas, the work serves as an allegory for the Wagon Tragedy, which took place in the artist’s native state of Kerala in 1921 when, following an uprising, British soldiers rounded up some one hundred people and packed them into a small train wagon, where seventy of them suffocated.

The motif of the railway wagon also cropped up in Power & Knowledge, 2016, which is made up of twenty-four small-format oil-on-canvas paintings. It depicts both real and imagined matchbox covers with pictures of cannons and bombs, monarchs and microphones, underscoring how power and violence are inextricably linked. Here, as in the rest of the exhibition, Madhusudhanan offered a telling commentary on mankind’s propensity to devise ingenious means of torture, and on the chilling role of machines and technology in furthering this purpose.

—Meera Menezes