An ambitious project, designed specifically for the spaces of the Foundation, “HAZE,” aims to offer an unprecedented look at South Asia’s contemporary art scene and underlines the role of visual arts in the narration of a global crisis that affects different areas of society: ecological, political and socio-cultural. The show presents established and emerging practices of 21 artists of different generations from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, ranging from painting, sculpture, drawing, photography and performance to site-specific installations.
Underlining the dynamism of the South Asian art scene, the exhibition explores different approaches to the contemporary, presenting narratives and reflections that embrace a wide range of themes: from the conditions and rights of workers in an era of global migration to gender issues, from post-colonial legacy to the expropriation of indigenous lands, from freedom of expression to political situations, up to the survival and metamorphosis of traditions and rituals.
Curating the exhibition together with Mario D’Souza, HH Art Spaces is an artist and curatorial collective in Goa, India, to which some of the presented artists belong. Launched in October 2014 by Nikhil Chopra, Madhavi Gore and Romain Loustau, and later joined by Shivani Gupta and Shaira Sequeira Shetty, HH Art Spaces promotes workshops, exhibitions, events and artist residencies with a particular focus on live arts and performance.
For this exhibition project, the collective wanted to illustrate the voice of an entire subcontinent: “The rise of nationalism and its majority politics in India; an economic crisis and resulting political instabilities in Pakistan and Sri Lanka; the authoritarian repressions of freedom of speech with the arrests of critics and journalists that are rampant and ever more unchecked means that the walls that separate us as people are getting thicker and thicker. Hatred and fear are the tools used to disempower minorities. Through these aspects, the exhibition aims to present an entire region through the porosity and possibility of stories and legends, of what remains alive today and of what has been lost forever, in a time marked by polarization, violent politics and majoritarianism.”
Through the language of art, “HAZE” therefore aims to offer a perspective on the polarities, contradictions and dualisms that characterise the four countries of origin of the artists, trying to focus on themes and narratives that appear shrouded in a ‘haze.’ Haze can be thought of as fog, smoke, smog, toxicity, or magic: an unknown that reduces the distances between us to remind us of the fragility of today, of the present moment, yet at the same time creating an opportunity to evoke new visions and develop an acute awareness of the present.
“A thick fog envelops the region.” With this image, the group show “HAZE. Contemporary Art From South Asia” opens in the new spaces of Fondazione Elpis in Milan.
Fog and region are the two key words that punctuate the exhibition’s narrative. On the one hand, fog is the common thread that unites the works on display, varying according to different levels of reading and interpretation: mist, smog, smoke, mist, toxicity and magic, a veil that envelops the present and in turn making its contours uncertain. On the other hand, the region is the field of investigation of the exhibition project which attempts to provide a cross-section of the contemporary art scene of four countries of the Indian subcontinent—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
The exhibition begins on the ground floor, where fog is perceived as a toxic smoke that oppresses the earth and its population. It is the smoke of global pollution which causes lakes and seas to heat up, altering their ecosystems. This is a theme undertaken by Sahil Naik with the work All Is Water and To Water We Must Return, a story of natural and human resistance and resilience that narrates the dramatic and poetic story of the town of Kurdi, in the Goa region, submerged by water following the construction of a dam in the late 1960s.
The work with its dynamism replicates the continuous emergence and drying up of the waters which lead the houses to resurface periodically in the summer. A moment to be celebrated with songs and rituals by the original inhabitants, who can return to occupy their homes, even if only temporarily.
And what happens when our visual perception is challenged? When are our paradigms of interpretation confused? Madhavi Gore’s gouaches Untitled I and Untitled II play on this, in a colorful abstractionism that challenges formal paradigms. Visual perception is also confused in the photographs of Shivani Gupta, Of Rock and Apricot and Mountain Top, where a rock in the middle of a meadow can be a footprint, a fossil or a vestige of the past, basically everything depends on our eye and our imagination.
On the first floor, the mist takes on geographical borders which fade and blend into each other, summoning thoughts about national belonging. This process concerns cultures as much as religions and national borders themselves. Haze can envelop the land, its definition, the creation of borders, bringing about indefinite and suspended situations.
Kedar Dhondu’s Trying matter recounts the porosity of a judicial system still linked to the traditions of the feudal past, where disputes over the ownership of buildings still occur today between the heirs of landowners and the heirs of those who worked the land. But the mist can also represent a suspended situation like the legal non-definition of the indigenous peoples who live on the borders between Bangladesh and Myanmar, stateless in their land due to continuous repression and expulsions by both countries, as evidenced by the series of works by Joydeb Roaza, titled Generation Wish Yielding Tress and Atomic Tree. The theme of borders returns in the Security Banners series by Bani Adibi, an inventory of the security barriers used in the city of Karachi, and in the Mannar Map cartographies by Pala Pothupitiye, in which the upside-down image of Southeast Asia inspires the viewer to question the identity of the whole region.
In the basement, Haze transforms into a mist where different spiritual traditions meet and new ones are created. Diptej Vernekar’s work Spiritual Machine speaks of this; in an ironic way the work conveys how in Goa, from the colonial union of animism and Catholicism, a ritual system based on ex-votos came about which in turn became a real market.
A strong image then takes us back to the economic, political and social crisis deriving from the pandemic of 2020. In that period, thousands of people, having lost their jobs, were forced to leave the cities to return to the countryside. Unable to travel on trains, the inhabitants started walking, creating endless processions of people who suffered all kinds of humiliations, including forced disinfestation. Among them the artist Soumitrimayee Paital, who, starting from this experience, painted the series Enemy at the Door which reflects on the multiple personalities that hide behind a face.
The sea opens and closes the exhibition, or rather the Indian Ocean does, the undisputed protagonist of the history of the Asian subcontinent, from the Silk Road to the trades of the India Company, from colonialism to the slave trade. Beneath a steel sky by Pranay Dutta addresses the ocean; the installation confuses water with the sky and the clouds that are reflected in it, in a continuous game of perception that creates a parallelism with the works of Lala Rukh, who has portrayed the Indian Ocean from several geographical points, fascinated by the idea of the impossibility of depicting an element in continuous movement and evolution. Mist lies at the horizon above the sea, a place where we lose our perception and begin to consider the infinite.
Participating artists:
Bani Abidi, Nikhil Chopra, Avian D’Souza, Madhu Das, Kedar Dhondu, Pranay Dutta, Madhavi Gore, Shivani Gupta, Yasmin Jahan Nupur, Munir Kabani, Romain Loustau, Sahil Naik, Soumitrimayee Paital, Amol Patil , Pala Pothupitiye, Fazal Rizvi, Joydeb Roaja, Lala Rukh, Vineha Sharma, Divyesh Undaviya, Diptej Vernekar.
at Fondazione Elpis, Milan
until March 5, 2023