Mulberry Walls, Flyovers, Billboards & Common Man
Subba Ghosh’s solo exhibition in London
-Sabrina Osborne
A mere glance at cut out realistic generic life size portraits of common Indian folk, standing against the velvet mulberry walls in a central London art gallery, reveals their story of displacement and non existence in this apathetic world, in a whiff. It reminded me that half a century ago Orwell said, “All men are equal, but some are more equal than others”.
Today even when social media networks like Twitter and Facebook are credited to stimulate mass revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Iran & Syria, these still fail to fathom and bridge the anxiety and isolation which fills the contemporary world. Politically motivated momentary movements like Anna Hazare’s fight against corruption or Rahul Gandhi’s debates on “Aam Adami’s” (Common man) suffering, still seems distant and cold in the nihilistic world that surrounds the common man, who is very much part of our everyday life but at the same time almost non existent.
Subba Ghosh’s first London solo exhibition at Indar Pasricha Contemporary & Ben Hanly, deals with many such concerns.
Post Slum Dog Millionaire, billboard style cut out images of ordinary Indian man can be seen as some pop icons of shining India, which is also gaining its repute for its famous orderly chaos, poverty, corruption and above all slums. It is a strange mix of melancholia and entertainment, especially when real people from the artist’s everyday surroundings play the protagonists. It is like substituting real for fictional for making a narrative more affective and effective, which indeed works. The language used is of luring mass advertisement but depicting alienated generic portraits of people from badly lit, stinking, small devious streets, belonging to diverse societies and localities. I remember asking a rickshaw puller his age and was shocked to know he was only twenty-five years old, when he looked at least forty-five. The internal migration transforms them in to malleable fragments of the jigsaw puzzle of the very fabric of our society, enwrapped in clouds of their own aspirations and expectations.
In his statement Subba says,” I do not believe in concrete structures like the state and religion. They are both artificial entities. In reality there are no marked boundaries, it is a palimpsest. Perhaps it is on the fluid borders of these categories and moving populations, with their aspirations and expectations and desires, that I want to place my figures in, not just as witnesses, but as infiltrators. They represent the other of our society. A dislocation within which we live”.
The exhibition made me think of Orwell’s 1984 novel when he used the word “doublethink”, which is explained as ,“ The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely.”
It is no secret that India’s GDP growth touched historic highs during the last decade. India's diverse economy encompasses traditional village farming, modern agriculture, handicrafts, a wide range of modern industries, and a multitude of services. Services are the major source of economic growth, accounting for more than half of India's output with less than one third of its labour force. Even then capitalist India concentrates only on the development of a few big cities and building infrastructures to serve and comfort the rich. In this fast lane, I wonder, where the common man stands with his bundle of aspirations clutched between his arms?
The exhibition was at Indar Pasrich Contemporary & Ben Hanley , London, from 9th November till 3rd December 2011.
Subba Ghosh was born in New Delhi in 1961. He gained his BA and MA at the College of Art, New Delhi and later studied Fine Art at the Surikov Institute of Fine Art, Moscow. In 1996 he completed a second MA in Fine Art at the Slade School of Art. He has exhibited extensively throughout India and internationally. His work can be seen in many public and private collections including the National Gallery of Modern Art, India and GlaxoSmithKline.
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