The Exhibitionary Complex

Shows with layered themes dot Panjim on the occasion of the Serendipity Arts Festival. Meera Menezes pays a visit.

- Meera Menezes

A blood bank is scarcely the place you would expect to see an art exhibition. So, it was both wryly ironic and curiously apt that Counter-Canon, CounterCulture, curated by Nancy Adajania was mounted in one during the Serendipity Arts Festival, held from the 15th to the 22nd of December in Panjim, Goa. In the exhibition, Adajania drew on her two-decades-long practice to deviate from the dominant narratives of Indian art history and look, as she outlined in her curatorial note, at all the “wrong places.” These included trade fairs, nightclubs, movie makers’ archives, inter-disciplinary workshops, design schools, architects’ marginalia and youth subcultures, to unearth “a series of ‘pre-histories’ for India’s new media art between the 1940s and 1980s.”

Magic was one of the tropes that Adajania ventured to employ, opening the show rather unusually with the documentation of illusionist P.C. Sorcar and his ability to bedazzle the foreign broadcast media. She then went on to forge linkages with the “magic of early cinema” and experimental films.

One of the gems in the show was the section that drew upon the archives of the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW) to highlight its interdisciplinary collaborations. This included a letter written by artist Akbar Padamsee to film-maker Kumar Shahani expounding on a colour axis for his film Maya Darpan and a picture of the young artist Ranbir Kaleka in conversation with the film-maker Mani Kaul. Padamsee’s animation-based work Syzygy made at VIEW was on display, while Ashim Ahluwalia’s film