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Line Of Control: Subodh Gupta at Beijing's Arario

The title Line Of Control converts a blasé media stereotype into a poetic metaphor. Here, a phrase invariably used to describe contested borders between disputed territories from Bosnia to Kashmir is shorn of its limited and limiting geo-political rhetoric to describe that invisible-yet-concrete time-space that exists between want and aspiration; between realisation and faith; between dreams and reality; between night and nightmare.
Gupta's giant sculpture, Line Of Control (from which the exhibition also derives its title) symbolizes that uneasy pressure-spot which seeks to liberate mundane tension-ridden reality through a bursting mushroom cloud of kitchen utensils: Wittily proposing, as it were, a cloud-burst of Prosperity, Peace and Harmony. Subodh Gupta navigates his chariot of transgressions here in a cathartic pageant –that of a world constantly being lost /destroyed and yet emerging anew, reconfigured, reconstructed from its own debris.

Of great importance is his work School which consists of steel and brass. The brass plank meant for sitting and the thali and small bowls and the steel glass recreate the village school that Gupta remembers so well. `I always felt that being modern means to bring forward the images and culture of the past,' said Gupta in a conversation to this critic before he left for Beijing. The installation detail formed the cover of a brilliantly designed card by Arario Beijing. Gupta's concern for dimensionality in paint parallels his being a sculptor and installation artist. In 2004, he continued with sculpture his discourse on the thematic concerns—migration and global displacement—that he had addressed earlier in the Saat samundar paar paintings. School is a series of gilded bronze like brass thalis and little bowls in the thali and steel glass speak of middle class morality and associations. It is a monument to transience as well as nostalgia, exemplifying Gupta's humble upbringing in Bihar as well as his now-trademark glorification of the quotidian elements of life in India. By showcasing them in paintings and gilding them in sculpture, Gupta has positioned the most mundane objects in the sanctuaries of our times: art galleries and museums. These newly-sacred relics also can be found in latter day domestic shrines: private collections.

The traditional signature of his past becomes Gupta's lingua franca. Though there were only a few works in the show at Bejing the show has brought in crowds galore curious to see India's hottest artist.

The show is a host of metaphorical connotations and each installation has insight and intensity in the manner in which Gupta weaves his vocabulary of variety. By the invocation of the many metaphors of food and its containers, both the sublime and the sensual are never far from Subodh Gupta's ever hospitable high table. But what amazes constantly is his signature of simplicity. His amazing work Start.Stop comprises a huge, slowly moving sushi belt fitted with scores of tiffin boxes. On the one hand, this work talks about food and how it has travelled in time across seas and continents, and on the other, it recalls the obscure destiny of the dabba-wallas of metropolitan Mumbai who manually transports wheel-barrows of tiffin boxes filled with home cooked food in a fast changing urban reality where industrially packaged foods soon threaten to become the convenient norm. In this seductive formalisation of the 'moveable feast', the mantra for nirvana is a clever combination of eros and astonishment.

Line Of Control also presents a seemingly simple work, I Believe You, composed of a pair of well-worn rubber slippers in a shiny steel platter. Whose feet did these slippers once fit? Was he/she a wretched landless peasant running an endless race to the Big City? Or a martyr-without-cause felled by the enormity of his/her own blind belief? Or do they represent the enlightening and enlightened foot print of some saintly soul, a modern day Buddha, perhaps?

The exhibition also includes some major canvases by Gupta depicting stainless steel utensils in chaotic motion interspersed with blobs and ribbons of pure colour disrupting the surface of the picture.

Gupta and many of his fellow Indian artists have changed the face of contemporary art in India. Their global fame has hurled them into the international art circuit and, like contemporary migrant workers, they travel abroad and return home financially rewarded. They spend hours in airports—the way station of migration. Gupta acknowledges this and has insightfully produced gleaming tributes to India's shifting society—and to his own migration from rural roots in Bihar to urban Delhi, from local India to global art community. The loss and regaining of home and place in a rapidly changing India are honored in Gupta's trolleys and taxis laden with baggage meticulously realized in bronze and aluminum, and paint. This show at Beijing reaffirms Gupta's genius as India's biggest brand in contemporary art.