Sculpting Air

Sculpture has divine realms in our society. We in the Indian subcontinent through generations have seen an interplay between the divine and the conceptual. Sculpture and Architecture get mentioned together within the ‘Shilpa Shastras’ a group of texts existing from a time before the Vedas that stipulate design, shape, proportion and materiality of temple sculpture and architecture.

A sthapathi can be an architect and a sculptor. Our caste system forced our artists and artisans to only excel in their talent to the trade they were forced to ply. They could not innovate in form or materiality but our constitution brought freedoms of expression and  today the realm of sculpture has responded to our diversities of culture, faith, region and language. Saloni Doshi’s collection of sculpture begins with the antiquities gathering objects, brackets and yalis, as well as  Burmese boxes, footstools and pieces of veneration. It briefly encounters modernism and then holds a vast genre of contemporary sculpture from South Asia through her acts of collecting and the residency program at her institution, Space 118. 

Krishna Reddy known for his work with printmaking was born to a father who was the village temple sculptor in Nandanoor and began his artistic journey as a sculptor. At Santiniketan Ramkinker Baij asked him to follow the form of the stone whilst sculpting any material. Reddy, while working with anarchist marble miners in Carrara, would find his forms in the  white stone but would always be preoccupied in a memory that authored the form of  those sculptures. Whilst helping in relief work alongside students from Santiniketan in 1943 he was enlisted in cremating the victims and his hands remembered the limbs of the emaciated bodies and their bones became the forms of his long limbed statues. He always sculpted monuments to the common folk – Demonstrators 1968 – memorialising the Paris Protests of 1968 is not influenced by Giacometti; rather the form came around in 1950 and directly referenced his memories from Bengal. Indian sculpture has always looked for form and narrative within the grassroots of our diverse geography.

The Cholamandalam School specifically S. Nandagopal among others drew aesthetic inferences from village deities who were inexpensively made using available materials such as metal and stone where the idea of its divinity held conceptual prominence above its figuration.  This conceptual simplicity allowed an entire school of sculpture to emerge from Madras. L.N Tallur with his iconic sculpture ‘In Thin Air’ weighs in how the Sthapathis (traditional bronze casters) of yore played with the idea of the sculpture being afloat defying gravity despite being cast in five metals of the panchaloha bronze.  Saloni Doshi’s menagerie of sculpture is one where materiality punctuates the concept and the aesthetic across the many oeuvres in her collection – that transcend many decades of art history in the subcontinent.

Nandagopal’s sculpture has divine proportions cast in metal as if it is in flight and floating in space. The back of the statue is hollow like many village deities in Tamil Nadu. This aesthetic tradition borrowed from subaltern practices of venerating village deities is a conceptual decision for the sculptor. The Cholamandalam village founded by the great painter KCS Panicker was always engaged in a dialogue with artisan communities where it hoped artists would sustain themselves through a modern arts & crafts movement. Thus simplicity of form and construction was essential to the making of the object. 

S.Nandagopal is flanked by a group of skylines that perhaps depict the roofs of temples, mosques and gurudwaras announcing a keen power of observation by the artist Ayesha Singh. She imbibes a very simple form of technique that has its origins in industrialisation. Like the artists of the ‘arte povera’ movement in Italy she does not fetishize artisanal practices from the past rather her work celebrates the labour of the many metal-workers across the towns and cities of the subcontinent who fashion grills, gates and furniture using a welding machine. 

Across North India the skyline of towns and cities are marked by the domes, shikharas, minarets and spires of temples, mosques and gurdwaras. Military cantonments and big cities have churches. As a visitor we often see them as the only well-designed and well-built edifices in the town’s haphazard urbanism and this often reflects the aspirations of its people but also as symbols of the confrontations of unfortunate but increasing communalism. The room that holds these sculptures is choreographed as a shrine. A shrine not to encourage divinity but to investigate the role aesthetics play in belief. How ‘perspective’  as an act of the artist can have divine consequences which may serve or destroy humanity. 

Thus when one encounters the work of Teja Gavankar we are reminded of the curved cupola of a Buddhist stupa. She engages in a mirage; her brick made concrete sculpture is airborne. The Buddha rejected organised religion and urged humans to think beyond the realm of what they were witnessing and had witnessed until now, to seek beyond traditions and the culture that constricts their freedoms. Conceptual thinking began at this moment when man was erased of his fear. A conceptual artist well performed by Teja should be able to sculpt and paint beyond technique and forms taught to them. Sakshi Gupta uses found scrap metal to make bird wings and life size pigeons perhaps as an artist she is reminding us of our receding freedoms in the 21st century? Samim Alam Beg using stoneware draws the skeletons of vegetal matter as architectures of the self. In times of constant information architectures of the self are urgent reminders to save ourselves from erasure. Sudarshan’s spectacles with speaker cones talk of our moment today. We see things loud but can’t speak of them, censuring ourselves and becoming unheard. 

Chandrashekhar Koteshwar performs the role of a fictional archaeologist with his clay figurines that are sublime and intricate like maquettes of the past. One such sculpture which is gold leafed depicts a foot trampling a Buddhist figure and another shows a couple standing holding each other. Some of his terracotta again echo the aesthetics of India’s Buddhist past where art conceptually saw its crescendo. Perhaps the foot represents the destruction of enlightenment that followed with the fading away of Buddhism from India. 

In the older parts of the city of Bombay, where once the native town stood – now more popularly known as Kabladevi ,  merchants were once invited to the city to come trade, hold commerce and inhabit the environs of the port.  Diverse communities from Marwar, Kutch, Kathiawad,  Chawl ,  Malvan ,  Khandesh and Khambhat migrated to the city to make money in the markets of cotton,  opium and spice.  Bringing with them long traditions of architecture and construction reminding them of home. The port of Bombay also did brisk trade in timber brought down from the forests of Mozambique – ebony, Mahogany from Brazil and teak from Burma.  Ceylon – Sri Lanka, Mangalore, and Cochin would also send wood.  

The traders would use these woods from across the oceans and forests beyond the Western Ghats of Maharashtra to build pillars, beams and corbels of their stately homes, sandwiched between narrow streets and plots.  To stand apart the frontal beams were intricately carved. Carpenters of the Mistry caste from across Gujarat would use wood that would withstand the Bombay monsoons and the salty air brought in by the breeze. In the past few years these mansions have been brought down and replaced by skyscrapers which now dot the ‘C’ Ward of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation BMC’s burrow that makes up most of the bazaars, textile districts and temples such as that of the city’s Goddess Mumbadevi. Decongesting the area through high-rises has congested the skylines with gaudiness. 

Today the Heritage committee of the city is busy protecting old Neo-Gothic stone buildings that often get axed by enterprising realtors by way of corruption while these old wooden mansions fall and break away each day without notice.  Their magnificent beams and brackets get sold by demolition contractors to the ‘Lakda Bazaar’ or the used wood market near the red-light district of Kamathipura.  Many of these brackets are corbels and distinct designs of semi-aquatic mythical animals, yalis of lions and bulls,  as well as horse riders.  

A ‘ Makara ‘  is a mythical sea-animal that is semi-aquatic, often in the form of a crocodile or a Gangetic dolphin.  It usually has a terrestrial animal such as a lion head or a bird like a peacock in the frontal body and an aquatic animal such as wide jawed dolphin or fish on the hind.  Indian wooden corbels are where makaras are often seen and aesthetically act like gargoyles in Gothic architecture but here they have a utility of actually carrying weight for the wooden beams in the form of brackets for the roof or the wooden floor in multi-storied structures.  Intricately decorated they have floral motifs such as vines with flowers and plumes of a peacock.

‘The ‘Anapakshi’ a common makara corbel seen in Tamil architecture is formed by a Swan head and beak with a peacock’s bloom.  The bird holds a vine in its beak as a symbol of being able to distinguish milk from water or truth from falsehood.  The ‘ Yali Corbel’ is a makara with a lion head, elephant tusks and an ox body.  

Makaras bring protection, abundance, good fortune and beneficence .  They act as the vehicle of Varuna – the God of Sea,  the river goddesses Ganga ,  Yamuna and Narmada .  They originate from Buddhist sculptural traditions as the seat of Buddha and wisdom and were later incorporated into Hinduism.   Makara is a representation of the Zodiac sign Capricorn.  The animals chosen to represent come often for their qualities mentioned in the Jatakas.  When a makara is crowned by a peacock it often is symbolic of Saraswati ,  knowledge , wisdom and aesthetic artistic quality akin to the  Buddhist Goddess Mahamaya or Ambika in Jainism.  

Two large corbels have makaras that are crowned by a Peacock that is perched  by a parrot.  The peacock is the vahana of Saraswati and Skanda or Kartikeya. The peacock refuses to kill snakes despite being able to ,  thus according to Jain belief it is seen as a symbol of non-violence .  Its feathers are seen as a plume of compassion.  The parrot is a bird of wisdom and determined in its faith , for it remembers and reminds us of the name of the ‘tirthankaras’ or wise humans in Jainism.  They emerge through a vine of flowers and leaves that begin in the wide jaws of a dolphin makara.  They are designs that not only have origin in coastal Gujarat but also from the Middle-East and Iran and maybe Zanzibar. 

Cactus is a symbol of protection across India and the shapes of cacti often form sculptural inspirations. But Chinmoyi Patel uses detritus to make sculptures that mimic house plants.  Across the world often house plants are artificial and only serve an aesthetic cause but also reveal our pretensions towards climate and what we project about sustainability.  Subodh Gupta with his ‘Guldasta’  or bouquet of flowers  museumises the many shops of kitchen utensils found across his native state of Bihar.  Women in small towns such as Khagaul are attracted to the metal lustre of these ‘bartans’- the colloquial term in Hindi.  Bihar has had its villages emptied out by immigrants who work in the metropolises of India.  Their kitchens become ‘museums of labour’  where every metal pot and plate is preserved and polished carefully, having been paid by the remittance of wages.  The bouquet is a gift to the sweat and longing of many millions displaced by poverty.  

Karl Antao fashions wood in the form of animals who perhaps represent their spirits in a divine imaginary.  Across Tamil Nadu we come across ‘Kovil Kadus’  or sacred forests that preserve man’s initial animist beliefs.  A belief system of preservation and respect towards nature is what has informed our ethics and the promise of empathy – a key pillar of humanism. Animals across this exhibition are metaphors of human behaviour and artists use sculpture as narrations of their observations of humans.  

Shaikh Azgar Ali in his sculptures called ‘The Wage Series’  uses inanimate circular metal cutting to form animalesque beings.  Perhaps these are the portraits of workers degraded by inhospitable conditions of work.  Animalism is often seen as a negative but perhaps in the 21st century humans have had a monopoly of violence in ways seen and unseen.  Manish Nai is a clear observer of the city.  His minimalist sculpture forms blocks of the city’s many vocations.  He abstracts the myriad functions of the complex city into a singular materiality – this could be indigo,  wire and newspaper.  In its minimalism the echoes of the many layers that form our lives in Bombay are aloud and speaking.  

Not far from Tuticorin in the Gulf of Mannar there is a coastal village of Tamil fisherman who converted to Catholicism during the visit of St. Francis Xavier in the 16th century.  The inhabitants of the village made huge fortunes in Burma and Sri Lanka and began patronising the building of Catholic shrines and statue monuments.  They invited artisans from Italy to fashion Italianate architecture and Christian sculpture for their town.  In this now largely deserted village there are still workshops making sculpture in Plaster of Paris using the same techniques and traditions from Italy which still survives among Christian communities of this coast. Benitha Perciyal makes shrines to Christ using wood, terracotta and a mix of scented powders to make us aware of these diverse heritage we hold and remember.  

Tanya Goel began painting on concrete inspired by Masaccio in the town of his birth San Giovanni Valdarno in Tuscany where she lived for a month-long residency.  She experimented with printing on concrete using found images of colour that would inform the pigment printed on the concrete block.   Her piece in Saloni Doshi’s collection is a fresco of layers of paint transparencies on found concrete debris. This debris is sourced from Nehruvian edifices – colonies of homes for government officers,  administrative buildings and government offices.  The brutalist concrete is an aesthetic of our socialist past and one that is now discarded by a regime keen to erase Nehru’s legacy of Modernism. 

Such debris of old homes destroyed now  adorn the thoroughfares of our cities as we demolish to develop.  By bringing painting to sculpture Tanya has now proven herself to be one of India’s only conceptual abstractionists who holds  a mature and deep commentary through her practice on materiality and  art history. Richa Arya’s cutouts in metal abstract light as the Sun moves and throws shadows through them marking time. Rathin Burman uses a grisaille palette to reflect upon the interiority of space in a home – but it is adorned by a brass lining that crowns the boxed forms of vernacular architecture. A staircase leads us nowhere – perhaps it metaphors our ambitions.  As India moves into an aspirational middle income economy we see that interior decoration becomes  reflections of our proposed selves. Rathin Barman inverts our homes as a psychological maquette with stairs going nowhere and the grisaille painting is crowned by brass lines to metaphor our pretensions of perhaps beauty? Atul Dodiya lends his hands’ fluidity to a bird in flight engraved in marble as Reyaz Badaruddin casts everyday objects in terracotta. Samarth Mistry makes murals of triangles, spheres and cones to present a history of cast surfaces we have seen in interior spaces.

Bhushan Bhombale began shaping parrots, small homes and the moon out of scraps of tyre rubber waste he would find lying around his father’s tyre shop in Bhusawal.  His practice in college became one where he would align pieces of coloured handmade paper and fabric waste he would source from the Surat’s cloth markets.  Using paint,  resin and adhesive he makes forms that are curved, circular and ones which gather to make abstract scapes. Having encountered Picasso’s 1967 catalogue of sculptures at the Tate Gallery, Bhushan realised he could use detritus as a resource material to fashion sculptures that could deserve the same treatment as his processes with paper and textile.

Sculpture became a venture of experimentation where Bhushan began arranging forms that often would take convex and concave shapes and began looking like the works of Argentinean,  Italian and Brazilian modernists who would play with form creating sculpture that at times was kinetic and at times inspired by birds at flight.  In another room  a pair of Dhodro Banam musical instruments from Orissa sit away from where they should have been and serve the purpose of their shape and form.   When we bring together varied forms,  materialities and concepts we attempt to hold a narrative for the curatorial but rather it is a survey of practices from a geographical reality holding conflicts and many promises.  History is never a story of mere happiness as it is  always punctuated by pain and pain is essential to the artistic act. Harman Taneja marks hue and colour in fiberglass as a magical realm of shadows that could be aquatic. 

Nandan Ghiya introduces the great Indian joint family as a glitch echoing the internecine feuds between siblings,  uncles,  parents and everyone rising within a home.  Home often is not a safe space but a space where dreams are born to die,  love is suffocated for creed and caste whilst work is servitude.  He partitions a carved wooden panel representative of what we would celebrate as our visual culture but one which he sees as a mirror of our traumas.  Antonio Puri during a residency in a village in Gujarat took photos of its inhabitants whose skin tones became the colour wheel of caste in the village.  Creating a DNA Double Helix out of canvases painted pink and brown he criticises the varna structure that holds villages together in a vicious circle of small mindedness.  

Seema Nusrat, an artist from Karachi in residence at Space 118 in the year 2015, made Bombay her muse during her time here. She began fashioning formless sculpture using materials used in building Bombay’s informal housing.  Her sculpture in the exhibition  is three large pieces of jute on which she has embroidered cowrie shells.  They wrap around each other and when hung together cascade from the ceiling like a burst of thoughts. 

‘Sculpting Air’ holds the presence of what we call sculpture and its absence.  The audience is made aware of the concept of sculpture and they author their experiences with these inanimate objects as artistic acts of perception.  At the Chidambaram temple in Tamil Nadu there is an empty shrine where a formless lingam exists of Shiva representing one of the five elements or ‘pancha-bootha’. This is the ‘Akasha Lingam’ or the lingam that represents the sky.  Shaivites present rituals to this deity believing in its formless form.  In a realm of ideas where we have the freedom to think, we can sculpt with air as long as we are willing to experiment with the etymological definition of sculpture itself, bringing forth new forms and material.  

Sumesh Sharma, Dakar, 2024