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ART PREVIEW

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Cut to the quick

New York-based sculptor and print-maker Zarina Hashmi held a solo show in Mumbai in February last year, but she has rocketed to popularity again this June, with two city galleries displaying her woodcut prints.
     At Gallery Chemould, Hashmi's six monochromatic maps (relics from her last solo at the gallery) are on view, alongside paperwork by other artists. The Guild, meanwhile, has chosen to give Hashmi the floor: 30 black-and-white woodcuts from the series "Home is A Foreign Place", made in 1999, are up on the walls.
     Growing up in Aligarh, Hashmi has lived all over the world (Bangkok, Paris, Japan), finally settling in New York in the 1970s. The experience of setting up house on the move has rubbed off on Hashmi's art. "Her work looks engagingly at the crisis of identity anchorage, which I guess is the most important experience as far as locating oneself historically and situating oneself as far as the present is concerned," says Abhay Sardesai, editor of the magazine Art India.
     From the 1990s, Hashmi has been making work that explores the need to belong. Her Delhi series, on view at Chemould, uses black-and-white maps of the city as symbols of cultural change. In Delhi2, handmade paper is bifurcated by thread-like lines of ink to form a seemingly abstract composition. But the image is actually meant to depict the boundary separating Old Delhi (the ancient city of the Moghuls) from New Delhi, constructed by Edwin Lutyens during the Raj. In Hashmi's print, the ideological differences between the two have turned into a physical division.
     Hashmi is best known for using minimalist, geometric forms - triangles, circles and squares - to express complex emotions. The fragile works at The Guild are good examples of this. Calligraphic strokes of black ink seep into grainy, brown paper, recreating scenes from Hashmi's childhood. Heat Breeze captures the mood of a summer's day in Aligarh. Black, horizontal lines are piled one on top of the other to depict wooden window-shutters. When looked at for a while, the dense lines appear to vibrate against each other, conjuring up the motion of hot gusts of air weaving through window-blinds. In Dust Storm, the page has been drenched in black ink, leaving tiny flecks of muddy-brown paper to peep through. These spots suggest the swirling movement of dust caught in a wind, sometimes morphing into stars spangling a night-sky.
     But the most touching images at The Guild deal with Hashmi's sense of loss. In Time, vertical lines are arranged in rows. Resembling the way children learn to count in school, where matchstick-like markings stand in for numbers, the motifs represent Hashmi's girlhood fascination with maths. The repetition of the image also conveys the passage of days, months and years. ZJ
See Gallery Chemould & The Guild in Listings.

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Moon
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entwined bodies morph into animal forms, a comment on our bestial nature. Ironically, these delicate drawings are filled with the idea of violence. In Is Knowledge of Infinity Mere Empty-mindedness?, a meditating man is being strangulated by another figure. Durvasula seems to be pooh-poohing the current new-age craze for spirituality, contrasting it with human beings' inherent tendency towards cruelty.

Sakshi Gallery
Most of the artworks at this gallery are not new, like Subodh Gupta's stool and Bharti Kher's dog-shaped vacuum cleaner that were part of the "Vanitas

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Anant Joshi
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Vanitatum" exhibition last year. However, the pieces are worth re-visiting in their new environs. For the most part, the selection highlights how ordinary objects are given a bizarre twist in the sculpture-installations, painting and photos on view. Anant Joshi's digitally configured photos were originally studies for the installation "Black to Play and Draw" showcased earlier this year. The installation revealed how the game of chess can be used as a metaphor for sociopolitical manoeuvring, and these photos contain a germ of the same idea. The installation depicts the severed heads of toys, which double up as malformed chess pieces, weaving violence into play. In one photo, a realistic-looking head of a toy man casts a bull-like shadow against a cheerful yellow background, making the image both ludicrous and sinister.
     Mithu Sen's use of seductively coloured cloth is even more visually enticing. 

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Sudarshan Shetty
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Hung on a pale pink hanger are satiny, pillow-like protrusions. Originally part of a solo show titled "I Hate Pink", Sen's "sculpture" is a mockery of the ideal of femininity that pink is usually associated with. The hanging pieces (they are rather phallic) are very soft to touch and overlaid with the prettiest of pink and gold beads, stitching and brocade, but they are also rather evil-looking on closer examination. They double up as gory internal organs, or even as malformed hatchets. 

Tao Art Gallery
We are told that the second floor of this gallery is concentrating on "figurative work". What this translates into is lots of gold-tinted painting of Buddha-like figures that stare up at us with long suffering looks. Luckily, livening up the display are two little "boxes" by artist Sudarshan Shetty. These creations are left-overs from the "The Quotable Stencil" show that was curated by Himanshu Desai in 2002. Shetty's boxes contain images of the Gateway of India printed on crumpled sheets of coloured plastic, which serve as cushion-like settings for seemingly random artefacts - like an object that looks suspiciously like an egg. According to Shetty, these installations were part of a series he made in 1999, which aimed at incorporating "the market-place into the gallery." Just as middle-class sitting rooms are littered with souvenirs from jumble sales, Shetty is inserting these kitschy things into a gallery space to highlight the fact that art galleries are just glamorous versions of markets - after all art, like kitsch, is also for sale.

42 TIME OUT MUMBAI|JUNE 17-30 2005