The world once we knew has been drastically changed by a tiny virus. Now we have a novel world, filled with umpteen challenges and dilemmas. While the world is suffering from the deadly pandemic, the time also questions the necessity of art and its practice. The shutting down of galleries and museums has put artists in huge turmoil in India already. As the humanity has begun to seek new possibilities amidst of this looming crisis, the advantages of online visual art exhibitions can be utilized conveniently.
‘Polyphonia’ is an online art exhibition, introducing the different visions of 13 contemporary young Indian artists whose works are significant at present. This is also one of a kind virtual attempt, arraying not only multiple medium practices but also divergent sexualities, behaviors, ideas and spaces in a single bouquet.
The cause behind the exhibition is that certain groups of people are different to be accepted in some people’s affairs- molded by the canons of established elites and hegemonic organizations, institutions, classes and races. The canons always evoke undetermined values into mainstream but later it causes for cultural infiltration and social regulation. Generally, the genesis and development of these parameters lie in the milieu of structural limitations of marking values through academic institutions, literature, art and history. It is apparent that how the canons of European men had ruled over the history of art for many centuries, without marking the existence of others’ art; sexualities, genders, Africans, Asians and other races. As the scholars and historians of art were western men, they taught and wrote art through their perception, formed by imperialism and patriarchy, made them blind to appreciate the odd values inside the canons and ‘unprivileged’ values. The rising of feminism and black movements challenged their academic canons later. But some of the canons what they had addressed and tried to reform are existing even today. Especially when we consider art in the global frame work, regional values from multiple things like cultural, political, ideological, historical, mythological, gender, class, race, etc. need to be addressed. Hence determining of values becomes a dilemma.
Various foreign invasions and colonization had changed the canons of India by the time. After the independence the country became united under a written constitution, assuring equal rights and opportunities to its every citizen irrespective of their difference. But the plurality of India seldom appears in its mainstream art zone. There seems, the canons of neo-post-modern Indian art are yet not generous enough to welcome the expressions or subject matters regarding the social outcasts. This exhibition neither suggests any new parameters to bring the omitted ones in the limelight but demands for re-thought and re-examination over the established canons of present world based on values. We cannot bring the values into a structural framework but they can be placed by the human intelligence and its cognitive abilities. However, Griselda Pollock says, “we need a ‘polylogue’: the interplay of many voices a kind of ‘creative barbarism’ that would disrupt the monological, colonizing, centric drives of civilization”. So this exhibition is trying to establish a global view on Indian art through a polylogue with its values.
‘Polyphonia’- the harmony of different voices is an ambitious composition of everyone who takes care of humanity and dreams for its peaceful co-existence and naturality. Consequently, this exhibition commemorates all past attempts of artists, writers, musicians and historians for annihilating the established canons of divisions.
Thank you,
R V Santhosh
Comments
Post a Comment