Visions from India

A fascinating show offers insight into the complex histories and cultures of South Asia.

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If you're planning a trip to the Art Gallery of Alberta to see Vision Exchange: Perspectives from India to Canada, make sure you have a few hours to spare. This exhibition takes time, but is worth it.

On view until Jan. 6, it features 20 artists, both Canadians of Indian heritage and artists from India, curated by the gallery’s director, Catherine Crowston, and Jonathan Shaughnessy, a curator at the National Gallery of Canada.

The artists are impressive with resumes that boast previous shows at places like London’s Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Some 140 works are on display, a dizzying array of photography, painting, mixed media, installation and film.

But it’s not just the scale that makes this Edmonton show complex: it’s the depth and breadth of its cultural, historical and philosophical references. These works take more than a glance.

Even the simplest drawings call for careful scrutiny. For instance, it’s easy to overlook Jitish Kallat’s understated Rain Studies amidst its many colourful counterparts. Kallat’s series, made with epoxy paint and graphite, depicts black spheres punctuated by white splashes.

Their significance emerges only after deciphering mysterious notes scribbled on each drawing. Kallat, who created his works at night by exposing prepped sheets of paper to the monsoon rains, has noted the exact moment that raindrops fell. Layers of meaning emerge: the dark spheres become the night sky or even planets. The split second of a single splash – such a miniscule force in nature – leaves a beautiful and indelible trace.

Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad echo the theme of time’s passage in their collaborative series, Fields of Sight, which transports viewers to prehistoric times. Gill, a New Delhi-based photographer, visited a tribal village in the coastal mountains of northwestern India, where she met Vangad, an artist steeped in his ancestral Warli knowledge. Gill photographed him, but soon realized that her work was missing a key element – his rich cache of myths and stories. Thus began their collaboration.

Vangad overlays Gill’s photographs with a web of pictographic narratives applied with bamboo quills. Images of contemporary village life are thus blended with traditions that go as far back as the 3,000-year-old Warli culture, and possibly even farther, to art created in rock shelters in Madhya Pradesh more than 10,000 years ago.

Most recurring symbols in this show refer to more recent events, including the end of the British Raj and the chaotic and violent partition of India on Aug. 15, 1947, a date seared into the collective memory.

Sarindar Dhaliwal’s the cartographer’s mistake: the Radcliffe Line delineates the borders between Pakistan, India and Bangladesh by covering the regional map with various shades of marigolds. A flower associated with healing, it is offered to divinities as a symbol of surrender.

Similarly, Reena Saini Kallat conjoins species that share fraught borders in illustrations that make up her Hyphenated Lives series. For example, she arms the mugger crocodile, the national reptile of Pakistan, with the powerful tail of the venomous king cobra, India's national reptile. Her drawings are pierced with barbed wire, a potent reference to geographical boundaries.

For the artists in this show, history is not a lifeless account of past deeds. Instead, it almost breathes. The past, the present and the future form a seamless continuum. While it takes effort to grasp the symbolic intentions of the works in this show, it's like digging up an ancient chest to discover it holds not dust, but jewels. ■

Vision Exchange: Perspectives from India to Canada is on view at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton from Sept. 29, 2018 to Jan. 6, 2019.

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