How does a city, a space, a topography with its sights, sounds, smells, histories and energies engage a collective off selected international and Indian artists, are issues in focus at a residency conducted by Religare Art i, called The WhyNot Place: THE TRANSFORMING STATE. The artist, and with them, the viewers dialogue with notional
and real architecture, maps and urban consciousness emanating from a living but stationary entity like the Connaught Place in Delhi. The project becomes specially topical and relevant given the transformation, disjunctures and punctures being inflicted on Delhi as a city in particular by Commonwealth Games projects and other urban conglomerations by globalisation.
Based on their own independent interests and practices, resident artists were able to process, critique and digest their impressions of the external and internal landscape in very open-ended ways. Mentors such Paula helped the artists contextualise their art practice within the transformation of Delhi while making their art and its process more meaningful within this shifting intra-contextuality.
The show explores the conflict versus continuity debate through almost all works produced, be it that of the American artist Brad Baincardi in whose installation one sees a wall full of the polygonal, hexagonal and circular shapes that form the bedrock of Islamic embellishments on which two auto rickshaws have been superimposed. An Indian artist, Garima Jayadevan, creates a surreal space full of mirrors where Mughal-e-Azam’s Sheesh Mahal meets GB Road which is interspersed with modern and symbolical signage. The destruction, deconstruction of a city as it searches for and creates new identities from fragments of a colonial past and a modern future is a subtext that can be viewed in many of the paintings and installations such as that of Jitesh Malik. The reification of lived space, the claims and counterclaims for attention and the sinking into oblivion has been explored by Koustav Nag through a colourful guide book of Delhi with a map of Delhi, superimposed and highlighted through projection, computer graphics and hyperlinks.
The workshop and works produced during it not only present the viewers with vignettes of a city, a country, a nation and an imagined space adrift in history, culture but also explore how this space is interrogated by artist who do not permanently inhabit the same.
— The writer is an art historian, curator and critic