Twenty modern artists from South Asia and its diaspora are featured in a new group exhibition at the Ishara Art Foundation on Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue. The artworks include watercolors, installations, sculptures, video, and photography, but they all have the same objective: to draw attention to the passage of time.
In terms of metaphysics, discovering time is a tricky endeavor. However, the artists included in Notations of Time demonstrate in concrete terms how its traces and tracks continue to be seen, not just in the political and intellectual realms but also in the celestial and terrestrial, according to the National. The exhibition, which was organized by Sandhini Poddar and Sabih Ahmed, creates a dialogue between various artistic generations in order to highlight the connections between the past, present, and future.
One section of Chandraguptha Thenuwara’s Beautification is one of the introductory pieces. In the 2013 piece Check Your Memory, bricks with dates inscribed on them are laid in tiles on the floor. The piece, according to Ahmed, is a “calendar created in cement” and is a reflection of the artist’s long-standing practise of depicting the mass murder and genocide of the Tamil population in northern Sri Lanka.
These dates mark significant occurrences in a longer history of colonialism, postcolonialism, and the Sri Lankan civil war, according to Ahmed. The remaining parts of Beautification are scattered around the exhibition area and include statues of Themis, the Greek goddess of justice, as well as her severed hand, head, and scales. The cement-based disconnected pieces portray a sense of unfair justice.
“What is the link between time and justice? is one of the questions we explored in this show. How long does justice take, and can time itself bring about justice? Islam says. Many people believe that time heals all wounds, but justice may also be served by time from time to time, or it may not.”
A collection of photos by Soumya Sankar Bose, 32, who is a photographer who analyzes historical erasures and is a generation younger than Thenuwara, may be found across from the cement installation of Beautification. The collaboration of Lala Rukh and Mariah Lookman’s works represents yet another generational coupling. On carbon paper, a diptych by the late Pakistani artist and activist Rukh displays wavy graphite lines that shimmer in the light, resembling the folds of a tranquil sea.
“She was a prominent and active feminist activist in Pakistan,” Ahmed says. “She used to create these minimal drawings and paintings of seascapes. This was broadly what she was doing for a long time — seascapes shimmering in the dark night. They look transcendental. They look spiritual. They could mean so many things.”
Many of Rukh’s students, notably Lookman, who she taught at an art school in Pakistan, went on to become well-known artists. Lookman is a British-Sri Lankan artist who divides her time between Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and the UK. She presents Night Song, a two-monitor installation that features a video and sound collage on one screen and music on the other.
Sheba Chhachhi, a photographer and women’s rights advocate living in New Delhi, also shares a collection of close-up images of an elderly carer she visited while going through a challenging health phase. “This is actually a rare piece of work that’s not so commonly circulated,” Ahmed says. “It’s called Silver Sap. It shows photographs of an old woman who has been a caregiver, a healer travelling from place to place, offering her services in massaging and healing people who are in stress or having ailments.
Amar Kanwar’s Listening Bench, Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad’s geometric figures that are carried over a generation in the works of Ladhki Devi, the cosmic touch of Haroon Mirza’s installation Light Work, the pace and rhythm of breath, and pieces from Ayesha Sultana’s Detail of Breath Count series are also included in Notations on Time.