“Subrata to Cesar is about the distance between the two goalkeepers. It is about the distance between the state of Indian football and what football is to a country like Brazil,” says artist Riyas Komu about a historic solo show which opened at Maskara Gallery in Mumbai last week.

Riyas is an artist who is fascinated by the spirit of youth, an artist who believes that the very game of football can be an installation in the ferment of Fifa 2010. But then Riyas Komu is the only Indian artist who created works with football as his subject.
Komu’s Iraq Project (2008) was a serial work which encompassed photographs of the team and its spectators, paintings and prints based on those images, and a series of sculptures of left legs — strange amputated and distressed objects, intricately carved in surreal anatomical detail from salvaged teak by migrant artisans from Kerala (the region from which Komu himself hails). The legs were skinned, tendons, muscle and ligament spiral down to the foot clad in football boots.
At the Maksrara Gallery in Mumbai Komu has used the concept of multiplicity and cased the footballs in a series of transparent boxes. Enchanting and powerful is the allegory we are given as we look at each ball fashioned with a timeless coating of antiqued vistas. The catalogue essay by Manoj Nair expresses the dynamism of Riyas’ sensibility best. “We are about to enter a state of apoplexy. We will soon be mouthing nationalist slogans though we don’t belong to any of the nations we will be shouting hoarse for. We will be screaming profane anthems, though most of us would not know the meaning of any of the syllables we pronounce. We would nearly pretend that the world is at stake. And the ball is not at our feet. Our feet would rather be hanging from our safe perches in our drawing rooms and our dreams drinking the latte of the sporting spectrum.”
By using symbolism and iconography of various kinds, Riyas allows his viewer creative space to further think through what he or she has perceived and to encode the artistic vision him- or herself. The installation pushes the power of questioning, and creates a corollary of many contexts within a contradiction of the here and now. Of course Riyas courts cynicism, but he also courts literary leanings as he pitches in on the very nuances of political ideologues.
It’s this preoccupation with the individual at the whim of external factors that ignites Komu’s work. The civilian, he seems to suggest, is the star. It is the symbol of a mass of people under the sway of superpower, an ideology or a belief system. As malleable as the meaning of a star, the masses are at the whim of any gathering force of aspiration.
“With the portraits of the Iraq team, I tried to find the most beautiful image of happiness of a civilian and I felt that football did that in Iraq. The statement which the captain made after they won the Asian Cup was so crucial and nobody used that in an art context.”
Riyas was posing the question: how and why do symbols of mass hope sustain the civilian, be it a Soviet star or the boot of a footballer?
This installation is a testimony to mobilising our desire for change. The footballs in each case echo the crossroads that curtail as well as disappoint. According to Riyas, we remain stranded and continually frustrated ,and we look at crowds that gather even as divisions of intensity deepen. Riyas also signals to the stalemate stance of football, where disinterest can divide or disappear.
In many ways Indian football faces a dilemma of being the victim of ill fated and failed globalisation, its overbearing characteristic being one of ferocious greed in the game of cricket. This single installation spells a big story of races within races. The curator and critic Shaheen Merali threw up deep questions in a show by Riyas at Teheran. Those questions by Merali come back in this show. Merali stated: “Where is beauty within this vitriol? Is art culture altering the values of contemporary expression or is it a place of hesitating moderates? Is visual criticism a surrogate or placebo of a long forgotten faith? Are we bounded by an inner constraint informed by casualties of a conveyance that constantly exterminates? Has culture as a form of expression escaped and retained a parallel authority and frames of reference?”
The questions naturally lead us to the present catalogue text-it throws up pertinent points to ponder. “Between Subrata and Cesar lies the chasm of several seas (or Cs).
In the alphabetical order C comes before S even as the C in Cesar and the S in Subrata make the same sounds. The difference, sadly, is that Cesar sounds more familiar than Subrata until he is your cousin, classmate or colleague. This single installation is an alignment of voices-echoes of a many generations.