"Crossings" at KNMA

What better way to spend a Sunday morning than wandering around the beautifully lit and overflowing with amazing art Kiran Nadar Museum in Saket. This is definitely one of my favourite museums and I decided to go along with a friend to take a look at the new exhibition called "Crossings".

So lets start from there - "Crossings" - the name is taken from the work of the artist, Rambir Kaleka who constructed four panels with fixed paintings on them but mixed these with video footage in the background which shifts and changes and at points even the fixed paintings and representations seem to have life breathed into them. The people represented are at crossings whether over countries, borders, the road and in their lives and it is a fascinating exposition of an art work which now encompasses not just the medium of painting but also cinematic representations which enliven the fixed elements of this original work of art.

The exhibition has some contemporary art but also installations that have made the transition from static art to digitized and videographed forms. I loved the stylised pictures of Dayanita Singh who took one of the most common aspects of life in offices all over India "the file room" and depicted them as they are. Clever and crafty but also lifting something out of life which may no longer be there in years to come.

The beautiful use of bindis by Bharti Kher in her elephant of fibreglass and thousands of well organised spermatic bindis. The shutters of Atul Dodhiya, half open and half closed each representing a different image to the onlooker. The Masterplans of Vivan Sundaram who displayed a town of Trash at the time when the Masterplan 2021 had come out. In the gallery he was displaying a picture in a digital medium recreating a city with rubble and refuse. The totally phantasmagorical work of Rina Banerjee in creating the "World as Burnt Fruit" with nets from Japan, bottles,cowrie shells, decorations, flowers and alligators with flashing lights for eyes. I have reproduced it from a postcard of it here but it needs to be seen to be believed and finally the as yet to me unfathomable work of Subodh Gupta.

Apart from it being an engineering feat, (art has now become an artist's concept but the collective effort of many others,) he has put together a massive structure all with domestic stainless steel kitchen ware which were produced in Korea and were welded together to produce this gigantic tree- like, mushroom structure which dominates the whole area. It is called "Line of Control" and the suggestion is this alludes to conflict areas but I cannot for the life of me see the thread to the daily utensils unless perhaps the suggestion is that daily life is positively explosive in a nuclear sort of way. Any other interpretations warmly welcome.

In a review from http://www.artmap.tv/news he is quoted as saying   ‘Line of Control’ stereotypically brings to mind geo-political conflict but I have used it here as a poetic metaphor, to transgress and subvert its known meaning and wittily present a cloud burst of another kind – of prosperity, peace and harmony.”