Sports and the city
A mammoth art exhibition, Art Celebrates 2010-Sports and the City, curated by Rupika Chawla, coincided with the Commonwealth Games. The exhibition covered all the available space of the premiere display art showground, the Lalit Kala Akademi. Though it did not receive the accolades, coverage or footfalls of events such as the opening ceremony, it nevertheless showcased a significant confluence of artists and art trends.
The theme of the show was sports and therefore figurative works were in majority, some of which were created especially for the Commonwealth Games and the others gathered from existing ones that matched the spirit of celebrating dynamic activities.
The latter including a work by late Manjit Bawa from his Acrobat Series. The movement, poise and the balance of the figures in this work is an exquisite depiction of energy, balance, kinesis and grace. A majority of works like that of V Ramesh directly refer to sporting activities and prowess.
Birender Pani in his work the Diver, substitutes his usual gotipua boy with a male diving figure in the centre, flanked by traditional Orissan sculptures and landscape. The work evokes the modern sporting telos of an otherwise conventional background, while a broader Indian ethos is invoked in works of some artists such as Manjunath Kamath.
More esoteric works such as Puja Iranna’s Svaas, or Breath, was a video installation of the expansion and contraction of the sides of a multi-storied building exhaling and inhaling in a collective breath, thus capturing the collective consciousness of a people in participative unity with each other through sport.
Since ancient Greece, artists have exalted and privileged the human, mainly male, prowess on display at collective, competitive games be it the classical and much imitated version Myron’s Discobolus or the more popular decoration on vases.
The Commonwealth Games inspired this very varied collection of works that are representative of the works by almost all established and better known artists of India today. The common thread of the games and the nebulous response of the various quarters of the country find aesthetic expression in the exhibition.
— The writer is an art historian, curator and critic
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