ARTICLE 1063 - Sheela Gowda welcomes us into her world via a Darkroom

[January 3, 2009] ED POTTON for TIMES ONLINE

Our correspondent enters Sheela Gowda’s new work for a glimpse of the transcendent


In the middle of the Serpentine Gallery in London stands a junkyard fortress. Dozens of metal drums have been arranged in rows to form its walls, some of them scarred yellow and red by corrosion. Others have been beaten flat to make the roof. At the front rise two towers, each constructed of three drums one on top of the other. And between the towers in a shadowy doorway, from which a voice echoes. “Hello,” it says. “Why don’t you come inside?” The voice belongs to Sheela Gowda, who created this installation, Darkroom, the centrepiece of Indian Highway, the Serpentine’s new programme of contemporary Indian art and events. The Knowledge photographer has got here before me and is shooting Gowda inside her own work.

I get down on my hands and knees and crawl into a cramped antechamber. It’s very dark. “A bit further!” says Gowda. Through another doorway, the floor changes from metal to asphalt, the ceiling rises so I can stand and, yawning above my head, is what looks like a starlit sky. It’s actually a constellation of holes punctured in the roof, through which light streams from the gallery outside. Some of it falls on Gowda, a calm 51-year-old with searching eyes, as she poses for the camera. Darkroom was constructed over two months from tar barrels used by road workers in her home city of Bangalore, she explains later as we make our way outside. “They humour me, giving me drums which are not too battered. I have them burn out the tar inside and then we flatten out the sheets under the road roller. It’s quite a long process.”

The resourceful practice of making houses out of tar drums is common in India, while the external architecture was inspired by the mock-classical columns of the British-built bungalows in which Gowda lived as a child, when her father worked for the Indian Service in the state of Karnataka. The piece is designed to contrast the material with the eternal, says Gowda. The cramped antechamber is “the reverse of what a house does for you. A house accommodates your frame, your needs, but here it’s the material that’s dictating to you.” This area is contrasted with the celestial space of the second room, “where putting holes into the same material opens up an expanse, where there’s no measure. It’s beyond material.”

A link between the mundane and the transcendent can be found in much of her work, from her elongated, ethereal drawings with ash to the striking things she has done with cow dung, You might not be able to polish a turd, but Gowda has certainly inlaid them with gold leaf. Her work with dung predates Chris Ofili’s Turner Prize-winning elephant dung art by several years, although she stresses that it is far from revolutionary in India, where dung is commonly used as a household fuel and garden manure. “People say, ‘Do you know Chris Ofili?’ I didn’t then but I do now. But women have always handled cow dung; I don’t have a copyright on it. It’s very much present in the culture, and seen as a mark of purification.”

Gowda’s recent output is very different from her earlier work, which mainly consisted of figurative paintings, partly influenced by her studies at the Royal College of Art in London. Some critics date her change of direction to the 1993 Mumbai riots between Muslims and Hindus. They are wrong, she insists; her first cow dung exhibition actually preceded those events by a month. The real trigger was a picture she saw in a newspaper during another period of Hindu-Muslim unrest: the Hyderabad riots of 1990, in which more than 200 people died. “It was of a woman holding a child,” Gowda remembers. “Both were looking into the camera, quite deadpan, but there was a deep gash in the cheek of the child. It affected others, too — years later I found a writer and a psychoanalyst who both referred to the same image.”

The photograph, perhaps, encapsulated her interest in the overcoming of the physical. She mulled it over while spending time in Switzerland, her husband’s native country, and when she returned to India her work became “much more conceptual. It’s about the materials speaking for themselves, abstracting things to a point where I have shed everything that’s not needed.” Her father, the Services man, was a chronicler of Indian folklore; she collects physical by-products. The dung, the ash, the tar drums; all are about “the end product, the remnant”. While past sectarian conflicts may have indirectly influenced Gowda, she downplays the effect of the recent attacks in Mumbai. “Worse attacks have happened, except they didn’t involve the rich and famous,” she says. “It’s terribly tragic nevertheless. I am concerned about the reaction of the people; it sounds as if they are on a warpath. For many years now there has been a see- saw of fundamentalist thinking.”

But she doesn’t believe that the attacks will have an impact on the artistic world — “not in any dramatic way”. She points to a painting by M. F. Husain that refers to “the rape of India” and November 27, the date of the Mumbai attacks. “That’s an artistic response that I don’t necessarily agree with, or want to comment on.” A more powerful influence, she insists, is the money that has poured into the country during its economic resurgence. When Gowda became one of the first Indian artists to create installations, she was greeted with frowns. “Especially with the dung: that was a bit much for some people. When I had my exhibition in Mumbai in 1993, the gallery owner’s father said, ‘Why have you brought cow dung into this gallery?’ ” But deep-pocketed collectors have changed things immeasurably. “Now artists think, ‘Who will buy this work?’ A lot of the big pieces were made possible because of buyers.”

Despite that, she still finds Indian artists “quite conservative compared with, say, Chinese artists”. How about the Brits? How might Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde creations go down in India? “Shock value is not necessarily on the agenda, so whether the Indian public would take to it, I’m not sure. Especially a cow cut in two . . . no way! There’d be a riot!” While they have not reacted so extremely to her own pieces, Indian audiences are still cautious. “Some people are afraid of Darkroom because they don’t know what to expect. And the hoity-toity types with their nice saris — of course they’re not going to go in!” But when they persevere, they are rewarded with a sight that means the same thing in Bangalore as it does on the banks of the Serpentine. “The sky is a common thing for the people of this world. It’s universal. Nobody can look at the sky and not become philosophical.”

Also showing in Indian Highway

RAVI AGARWAL

Agarwal combines social documentary and environmental activism in his films and photography. He focuses particularly on the marginalised in society amid the rapid development of New Delhi.

SHILPA GUPTA

Working with digital media in the form of online art projects and video fused with sculpture and photography, Gupta often invites viewers to participate in her work, using interactive technology to examine themes such as consumer culture, desire, border and territory.

SUBODH GUPTA

Recognisable icons of everyday Indian life such as stainless-steel kitchenware, bicycles, scooters and taxis form the basis of Gupta’s work, which highlights the impact of the mass migration from rural to urban areas that has characterised India’s modernisation.

N. S. HARSHA

Celebrated for reworking classical Indian miniature painting into a tool for social and political commentary, Harsha creates intricate canvases that depict hordes of figures animated in unison and wittily combine details from everyday Indian life with images of world events.

M. F. HUSAIN

One of India’s best-known painters, Husain started out painting hoardings for the Mumbai cinema and was a founding member of the avant-garde Progressive Artist Group in 1947. His work appears inside and outside the gallery, on billboards wrapped around the Serpentine building. (Naad Swaram Ganeshayem)

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE

Formed in 1992, the three-person RMC create installations, performances and encounters that aim to combine art with historical and philosophical inquiry. They have created a special show-within-a-show for Indian Highway.

TEJAL SHAH

Shah’s video, photography and performance work is primarily concerned with issues of gender, sexuality, class and politics. Her video installation What Are You? deals with historical and social constructs of gender, focusing on India’s Hijra (transgender) community.

DAYANITA SINGH

Singh is best known for her photographic portraits of India’s urban middle and upper-classes, but her latest work concentrates on places, such as the dramatic, light-streaked cityscapes of her Blue Scenery Series.

Indian Highway, Serpentine Gallery, London W2 (www.serpentinegallery.org 020-7402 6075), until Feb 22

TIMES ONLINE