War in the East War in the West

Idea/title of my curatorial section comes from the famous song, ‘Until the Philosophy’ by Bob Marley. This is a lyrical version of the famous speech by the Ethiopian King Haile Selassie. We live in a time of small scale wars. The world is no longer defined by geographical boundaries or linguistic sections, but it is defined by war zones of different sizes and shapes. There is a war machine constantly on everywhere in the world and by now we have learned to live with the buzz of it. Each war is dissociated from the victim of the same war through multiple mediations including television, newspaper and other ideological propaganda machines. We believe that war is always fought elsewhere even when the repercussions of it are heard and seen in disguise within the domestic spheres.

The artists of my choice, perhaps do not allude to war directly in their works. But they are aware of these small scale wars happening in our lives and their artistic attempt is to capture them live, mediate and negotiate them through/in aesthetic terms so that the impact would go directly into the realms of thinking. Babu Eshwar Prasad’s ‘Vortex’ is just a video grab of a scrap metal yard. But how much they remind you of a war-worn territory! Ebenezer’s ‘Narasimha’ alludes to the incarnation myth of Hindu philosophy with contemporary characters impersonating their mythical counterparts. His ‘Sakalakala Vallavan’ could be a cute spoof of the Southern film industry. But it aesthetically underlines the kitschy terror of our contemporary culture.

Kiran Caur Brar’s ‘Crackers’ is a simple take on the festivities of a Diwali day. However, until you know that it is a Diwali scene, your cultural and political thinking would make you interpret it for a video grab from a tensed frontier. Nikhil Chopra’s ‘Yog Raj Chitrakar’ is a revisit to a family history and its dizzying juxtaposition with our times. Kashmir becomes a backdrop and the streets or the city square there tell you how war plays a definitive role in the daily lives of people even when someone does the most innocent act of art making. Madhusudhan’s ‘Razor, Blood and Other Tales’ tells the tale of a man, an erstwhile revolutionary now turned into a menial worker. War and terror had happened to his life. And it comes back to him. If he wants he can take revenge. But does he? Even if he doesn’t, do the memories of war leave him alone?