Jyoti Bhatt & Manisha Gera Baswani
Presented 7th Nov to 20th Nov 2014
A SITE art space &
The Collective Studio Baroda
Collaboration
The process of
archiving is the preservation of things considered to be of significance. The
need to keep anecdotal memories alive for posterity, so that they remain palpable
and assertive long after their occurrence, allows for personal histories to contribute
to larger episodes of historical narratives. Such undertakings hold
socio-cultural value as they call attention to subjects that lie outside of
prescriptive academic interests, and which would otherwise be lost or forgotten
without this insistence to memorialising them through independent endeavours of
historicity.
Jyoti Bhatt and Manisha
Gera Baswani are self-designated documentalists. The camera became an
interjectory tool quite by accident for both these artists. However, they very
quickly adapted to observing life through a camera lens, and began to use it in
diaristic ways. Their common interest in documenting their respective contemporary
surroundings by photographing them persistently and exhaustively, offers us revelations
that would otherwise be obscured and off limits from any recorded scrutiny.
These photographs record
events and occurrences of the life and times of an art community, and by virtue
of their proximity to the professions of their subjects, Jyoti Bhatt and
Manisha Gera Baswani become participants unwittingly within this chronicled
history; lending these images a subtext of autobiographic interpretation. Being privy to these private worlds disallows
them from ever becoming voyeurs. Instead you recognise the ambient connection
they forge with these photographic narratives that also reflect the prevailing
cultural climate they both belong to.
Jyoti Bhatt’s black and white photographs presented in this exhibition evoke an era where the
climate of cultural change within India was charged with passionate discourse,
and where the implementation of newly formed governing modules for national
platforms of art activities were being strategized. Art education and
independent art practices began to flourish in post-colonial India. Stalwarts
like N.S.Bendre, Shankho Chowdhury and K.G Subramanyan, along with cultural
theorists, re-phrased aesthetic canons that were instrumental in shaping those
early years of Indian contemporary art. Many of the people photographed in
these images were engaged in articulating ideas of modernity, and its newly
phrased implications. Jyoti Bhatt places these moments of personal struggle and
collective enquiry before us, without any desire to underline its historical
importance, but instead offers it as a personal journey he has been part of. In
his usual self-effacing way, he underplays his role as a visual orator who
immortalised an era of seminal change within Indian contemporary art. What we receive therefore is the gift of a
genealogy through this documentation, to which we can trace our own belonging.
Manisha Gera Baswani’s coloured photographs on the other
hand, take you into a more assured stance of contemporary Indian art history,
where the artist and their practice has acquired a more autonomous space of
existence. In this time zone the discourse of Indian art has shifted to
encompass the global as a context of belonging. The lens holds focus on her
subjects, often in isolation, making them occupy centre stage, thereby emphasizing
the role of the artist as an individual - confident and firmly entrenched within
a social space of urban acceptance. Her photo documentation is culled from the
terrain of an establishment that already holds its rightful place within
today’s contemporary cultural history. As a viewer you are led into each photo
image to confer with a space of private thought, where you recognise the prevailing
intimacy of the moment as fleeting, and therefore supremely special. Manisha
Gera Baswani holds you captive to the celebration of artistic musings. She
draws your attention to the details that illuminate the character of her subjects
and their relationship with their work. Whether in a gallery space, in their
studios or homes, or in quiet solitude of reverie, the world of the artist becomes
the sequestered prism through which all else is viewed. Contemporaneity
recorded will now lend itself to posterity.
Rekha
Rodwittiya - 2014
