Sosa Joseph’s Pieta had its beginnings in a photograph of a woman belonging to a tribal community, which the artist saw in print. The woman’s red sari assumes an animated independence in the painting, suggestive of the intimacies of the flesh or an expanding flower. The woman is seated, and across her knees lies a lifeless figure, pallid. A peripheral figure looks with sadness and devotion at these key figures, and it is unmistakably one of the great subjects of Christian iconography that meets our gaze. Sosa (born 1971) approaches that piercingly tender, deeply moving moment when the body of Jesus Christ is taken down from the cross and his mother, the Virgin Mary, holds him on her knees. Jesus is no longer a child but a saviour who has played his historic role and given his life to atone for human sinfulness and suffering.

As Mary mourns Jesus, there is no thought of the Resurrection and the Redemption to come, only the experience of a mother who has lost her child. This compelling painting is made from veils of colour; its figures seem shaped from mist and flame, leaf and aura. It takes the form of a tableau, rather than Sosa’s preferred format of the densely peopled landscape or processional group. The central figures are in close-up rather than in the panoramic perspective that she usually favours. Sosa’s interpretation of the Pieta is set strongly in the present, in an ethos and habitat drawn from everyday Indian life.

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Red, for Abir Karmakar (born 1977), connotes the temperature of crisis, the pitch of emergency. During the COVID-19 pandemic, red has acted as a call to secure oneself while retaining a profound empathy with those imperilled by the virus, those in the front line fighting it. “I wanted to work from my immediate neighbourhood, my location in Baroda – and to go beyond visual information,” reflects the artist. The ‘red zones’, marking quarantined areas during the early months of pandemic and lockdown, seized his attention. He recognised that many of these zones were situated in the densely packed inner-city areas, their population belonging largely to the Muslim minority. Seen through this optic, Abir points out, the red zone highlights urban histories of ghettoization, the granting or withholding of amenities and civic entitlements depending on a politics of crude communal polarisation.

In his trilogy of works for this show, collectively titled Surface, Abir demonstrates his remarkable technical mastery, dwelling on the illusionistic surface, using oil paint in a manner suggestive of chalky pastel. He invokes streaky, weathered granite cladding; a stained, flaky, time-scarred wall; then brings them together in a tightly cropped view of an exterior wall, a metal staircase and a peach-pink wall beyond. He delights in the formal play between abstraction, through his evocation of surfaces, and illusionism, by conjuring up recessive space and the trompe l’oeil of the peeling notice stuck on the granite slab. At the core of Abir’s oeuvre is an inquiry into the boundary between the world as experienced and the world as represented to the most persuasive and, indeed, artful degree of verisimilitude.

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Siji Krishnan (born 1983) delights in evoking the daily life and routines of a village community, usually as a tableau that encompasses within itself smaller tableaux, each such detail assuming the aura of a significant scene of action in itself. In this untitled painting, rendered in oil on canvas rather than Siji’s preferred rice paper pasted on canvas, we come upon a community posed as though on an island protected by a grove of seven coconut palms. Siji employs a principle of cellularity to stitch her various scenes together into a larger social fabric. Here, we see various individuals at work on their grinding querns and mortars, a banana seller inviting the interest of potential customers, storytellers or gossips in action, the perennial processes of birth, weaning, play, and commerce all unfolding simultaneously. Siji regards red as an emotion, rather than a colour. It was omnipresent to her as a child growing up in the village of Chittikulangara in Kerala’s Alappuzha district. A focal point in this village is the famous Chittikulangara Sree Bhagavathi temple, dedicated to the Devi, the Great Mother, in her form as Bhadrakali. In Siji’s memory, red is closely and palpably identified with the chembarathi or hibiscus flower, sacred to the worship of the Devi. That memory colours this painting.

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The red bowl, rimmed in blue, which represents Nicola Durvasula’s contribution to this exhibition embodies the interplay of design and accident, the artist’s considered calibration of the mechanics of slip and glaze on the one hand, and the aleatory combination of material and temperature that results in the unforeseen blue trimming the red that was the bowl’s key proposition: a gift of chance. Nicola (born 1960) has evolved a subtle and evocative practice that extends from the most substantially material and haptic to the most shimmeringly immaterial and elusive media: painting, drawing, and the ceramic sculpture to music, graphic notational forms inspired by musical experience, and the filmic. Nicola’s art is inspired by a deep conviction that the image marks the point of convergence between an inner life of refined consciousness and the play of contingent, ephemeral appearances that constitutes the external world. Between these two domains come the senses, and how they mediate between interiority and the outside remains one of the enduring preoccupations of Nicola’s art. As a corollary, Nicola is deeply committed to the dyadic relationship between materiality and abstraction.

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Anita Dube is an art historian and critic turned artist. She works with a conceptual language that valorizes the sculptural fragment as a bearer of personal and social memory, history, mythology, and phenomenological experience. Employing a variety of material drawn from the realms of the industrial (foam, plastic, wire), craft (thread, beads, velvet), the body (dentures, bone), and the readymade (ceramic eyes), Dube investigates a very human concern with both personal and societal loss and regeneration. Marked by her early engagement with the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association, a self-styled political grouping of artists in the late 80s. She has since attempted to work with both ‘erotics’ and ‘politics’ that investigates the resistance of individuals and women, against the over-arching idea of ‘power’. 

— Khoj International Artists' Association 

Meanwhile, for the multi-panel painting – in more technical terms, a polyptych – Arun coats raw canvas with layers of rice paper, then brushes these down with paper pulp composed of the dust of pages from the Bible and sized with alum. Using jewel-like mineral colours chosen from the palette of the Jaipur miniaturists’ ateliers as well as powder pigments, ink and watercolour, he covers this prepared surface with a multitude of spots, circles, and dots. These arrays of motif and momentum form mysterious patterns, between symbol and properly non-objective abstractionist statement.

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The formative experience in the life of Somnath Hore (1921-2006) – the experience that radicalised him, as a young man in his early twenties – was the catastrophic Bengal Famine of 1943. This catastrophe shocked and galvanised a generation of artists, including Hore, Chittaprosad, and Sunil Janah, who journeyed through Bengal’s worst affected districts at the time, recording what they saw. Ever after, in his art, especially in his 'Wounds' series, Hore would bear witness to the starvation, the suffering, the needless deaths ​of men, women and children ​that he had seen, ​the entire famine ​brought about by the cynicism ​and miscalculations ​of ​the British colonial regime.

Hunger, a lithograph, offers testimony to how even the most seemingly serene rural environment can be devastated by decisions taken in the metropolis, by natural forces beyond human computation or resistance. Red, in this work, is a token of this ceaseless danger that threatens the basis of human settlement, community, collective action.

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