Art Basel: Basel, Switzerland

Elicitation # 1 (Terranum Nuncius) is a photographic diptych of images drawn from The Golden Record archive dispatched by NASA on the Voyager space missions in 1977. Here Kallat draws reference from his own recent installation Covering Letter (Terranum Nuncius) which encapsulates a summary of life on earth as addressed to an extra-terrestrial. A picture of children examining an oversized globe is paired with another image that demonstrates three modes of tasting and ingesting. For Kallat, these images of our existence indirectly allude to our relationship with the planet, forged by consistently consuming and surveying it. 

This set of happy prick drawings contains a withdrawal of presence and the subsequent opening of absence.

A personal album - that has no definite space in official history, innumerable morphed memories, stories, the pleasures and burdens of attachment in an attempt to question the transient nature of existence.

It’s a domain where reality draws and withdraws, chooses to expose the concealed, undress and reveals what lies beneath and questions the politics around what is chosen to be part of the political, collective, popular personal history and what is suppressed, (un)acknowledged and (un)seen.

It is about validating and accepting the Invisibles (the mnemonic world of traces, left-overs, wounds, erases, violence, remainders and reminders that are intentionally ignored) and serves as a disclaimer and an exercise in perceiving what the images are and are not confirming the validity of our existence and our experiences.

Inquiring into the theatre of life, N.S. Harsha’s work honours humble, everyday moments and events as having profound consequence in the meaning of our lives, pushing beyond mimetic principles that estrange art from natural encounter. Neither wholly spiritual nor wholly scientific, his performative compositions render esoteric concepts with wit and whimsy, his expressions almost always satirical about the human experience. In this sculpture, Harsha is interested in the role time has played on an iconic subject like ‘mother and child’ in art history. While experimenting in his studio with a series of ‘shelf-life’ sculptures made out of steel carton boxes, he pursued the transcendental form to locate the essence of relationship in contemporary society, which is deeply entangled in consumerist and capitalist culture. At the same time, Harsha recognized an artistic opportunity to infuse human and animal behavioural qualities into industrial material such as steel, bringing us a multi-dimensional work that melds divine knowledge with modern materiality.

Together Alone is a new series of works by Rashid Rana that deals with the subject of self-gaze while at the same time it also celebrates the notion of “self-love”. This digital montage is assembled from a collection of mirror selfies - a fairly standardised form of self-portraiture in the age of social media - in which the camera, the mirror, the seeing self and the seen self are all visible at once, confusing the distinctions between each. 

These images constitute a macro image of a series of self-portraits by Adrien Alban Tournachon, taken in about 1858. Tournachon, the lesser-known brother of the famous Nadar, stands still, balanced against a chair and holding onto a hat in hand. These photographs are a predecessor to Eadweard Muybridge’s experiments with describing motion through still frames. Tournachon’s portraits contain a similar desire for movement, as if the camera is mobile and omnipresent, examining his stance from a full 360 degrees. This surrender to the camera connects the earliest moments of mechanical imaging to the contemporary world, where performativity has replaced the formal stiffness and perhaps discomfort of Tournachon. 

In this work, the audience is left to construct their own narrative between Tournachon’s portrait/s and thousands of micro constituent images of present-day mirror selfies. The title of the work “Together Alone” refers to the dichotomy of the virtual (apparent) togetherness at a global level in this age of social media and the solitary figures contained in their own individual cells within the larger matrix of selfies. 

Unnoticed, a series of work by Gupta made from used car parts that are carried illicitly across the Indo-Bangladesh border, to have a second life when assembled into improvised vehicles on the other side. Placed against photographs of a blue sky taken along borderlands, they are aloft, sculptural forms freed from a mundane existence.

This series of works is an extension of the My East is Your West project she developed for the 2015 Venice Biennale. In late 2016 Gupta returned to parts around the border fence that India is building, encircling its neighbour Bangladesh and that is notorious for being the world’s longest separation barrier under construction between two nation states. However, says the artist, “daily life in the borderland belies state intentions and the flows of people and goods continue, prompted by historical and social affinities, geographical continuity and economic imperative". In the end, as the work reminds us that human ingenuity thwarts restrictions.

Saraf’s An infernal realm of our making is based on Sandro Botticelli’s Map of Hell, a visual interpretation of “Inferno”, the first canticle of Dante’s Divine Comedy. By discarding the biblical conception of sin and punishment, Saraf reconfigures Botticelli’s depiction of the nine circles of hell to present a telling account of human society. “The abysmal valley of pain”, or the landscape of death, despair and suffering to which one is subjected in the ‘afterlife’ as a consequence of wrongdoing, is posited as the reality of our time. 

Saraf subverts the fantastical and the otherworldly to navigate a world structured by inequality and a system that rewards wrongdoers. A world shaped by predation of natural resources, climate change, biological and chemical disasters, and a society marred by ever-increasing political strife and newer forms of oppression. A time where detention camps still exist and where war still rages. 

Layered with references to other drawings by Botticelli, Stradanus and Federico Zuccari, Saraf situates the work in the larger tradition of illustrated Apocalypses but at the same time diverges completely from their focus on the mysterious and the supernatural. She chooses not to ground the work in theology. Instead, Saraf uses diverse references from the art historical past as tools to explore and consequently develop a vocabulary through which we can better address the horrors of our time. Weaving different visual languages together, Saraf locates the ‘hell’ firmly in the here and the now. And, more importantly, portrays it as an infernal realm of our own making.