In the track of time this year, it was Pooja Iranna’s show which made you stop and think. One day after her show unveiled at Palette Art Gallery in Delhi, Pooja Iranna stood silently and watched her 7 minute 20 second-long video.An amalgam of a single photograph morphed into an animated possibility, Another New Beginning reflected the karmic genius of one of India’s finest artists. A photograph of a skyscraper in construction morphed into a breathless boat. The vertical plane when morphed into the floating horizontal, creates the counterpoint of the sturdy and dependable last through the ages, a man made structure becoming in time the wooden looking boat lustily floating in stormy waters.
The signature of succinct creation becomes an act of surreal summation. Man and structure replaced by nature and the advent of an animated study. The arresting video is the hallmark of technological bravado. It is almost as if Pooja develops in the course of this exercise, the commemoration of structure as well as the deepening of bhava, a mood that eludes precise verbal explanation while generating an unmistakable evocative response. This video conveyed a spectrum of emotional temperatures, ranging from the fragile to the tough, the auratic sensation of infinity to the quotidian awareness of light and darkness.
It demonstrates the way that video technology has gradually colonised consciousness, spreading from the single-channel video — the television set, a functioning sculptural object — to the total environment via multi-channel video projections. This line of progress exemplifies the marriage of video and installation art, a significant example of the blurring of boundaries between formerly distinct mediums.
Petite Pooja Iranna transformed the gallery space into one of quiet stapled grids and a few first time canvasses. Grids that reflect the strength and fragility of the human psyche as well as the bounteous reach of the fire of artistic imagination.
“Art is my breath,” said she, adding, “I’m always thinking about my work, my mind is never vacant. I’m always interested in the manipulation of imagery to portray the potential of human possibility. This is my second video. The first one was created using staple-pins. I feel that the video adds the fourth dimension to the artistic sensibility. And the staple which I use in my sculptures is so humble yet so potent in its ability to reflect complexities.”
The singular staple becomes the force of creative contsructs. Geometric complexities of design and architecture make way to mutations of significant synthesis. It has been 20 years since Pooja has been exploiting the matrix of the grid in practice. But she takes it a step further this time with a series of sculptural wonders that reflect infinite possibilities. Associations at once become imperative and innumerable. Confluence and Twist form the piece de resistance of the show for their idea of releasing the strength of monumental magic through their degree of evocative tenets in time and space.
“For the past few years, through my work I have been trying to explore basic structural forms as they denote solidity and strength. I also feel that they are contradictions in time. The staple is so fragile but also so strong. These structures help me metaphorically explore the sturdiness of human character,” she says.
Pooja’s interest in the grid has been in the possibilities for unlimited variations within its repetitive structure, in its accommodation of idiosyncrasies and its merging with other forms and structures. Intriguing is the balance and the structural finesse that she lends to the regularity of the grid. Then you have a series of deft works on the walls which personify the reflections found within the glass skins of many buildings or the pulse of life which moves through them. “I used three sheets of architectural gateway paper and then placed them on top of each other to create the idea of spaces within spaces and lines that lent a depth of interpretations,” says Pooja.
When she had her solo at The Guild in Mumbai in 2003, Peter Nagy had written that Pooja Iranna’s works may seem highly iconoclastic in the context of the Indian art scene still very much infatuated with the human figure. Yet her works, though entirely devoid of human images, are very much about the consciousness of the figure and its placement and experience of space. This experience is both physical and visual, both in real time and in memory. Pooja’s work attempts to trace the effects of architecture on the emotions and the psyche, attempts to find traces of our emotional and psychological lives in the structures and patternings of architecture. Hers is a struggle to find unique expressions of her own experiences, to acknowledge the distortions and manipulations that play with our emotional lives, and to create elaborate scenarios through an economy of means. This show then was about the labyrinths in the human mind. The tight hallways and bare spaces of the gallery serve to enhance the psychological intensity of Pooja’s work.
While the video drew special attention to the “ability of the medium to express emotional or psychological conditions”, the show was also a rare visual treat in the making of a kind of meditation on communication and creation. The artist’s narrative echoed the astonishing strength of visual kinetics in a language differential as well as distinctive.
The artist Pooja herself is a walking paradox; she abandons narrative potential altogether and registers only visually. While the stapled grids echo the progression to clarity and simplicity, the beauty of the endeavour is that this exercise doesn’t lead to an emptying repetitiveness. In fact repetition enhances the tensile and tactile quality of the grid like the consistency of the staples.
The few canvasses in the show were about how turgid and dense texture could be in the hands of an artist. “I wanted to show that each drop grows with time, it is about the strength and the ability of the human consciousness,” says Pooja. As in classical contexts, these drops seem to follow the viewer, focusing their opposing energies of courage and fear, action and hesitation. The canvasses in deep orchestrations of tonality become theoretical playgrounds of inside/outside, public/private, male/female and viewer/viewed, everything pours forth.