Violent Strokes

MIGUEL Angel Rios is a Mexican video artist. In one of his most spectacular works, which he also showed in India, Miguel creates an orgy of ...

MIGUEL Angel Rios is a Mexican video artist. In one of his most spectacular works, which he also showed in India, Miguel creates an orgy of violence. His black and white video is about a game of spinning tops. Throughout the video, which works on three simultaneous screens, we see these whirling, spinning tops competing for the last gasp of life. They hit and annihilate each other, jostling for uncluttered space and energy and the ground is littered with the fallen ones.

Miguel’s work strikes a strong parallel with what our newspapers report today: crime, violence, war, insecurity, land mafia. His work is rooted in urban Mexico, but it strikes a compelling chord in India too.

Think now of Anita Dube, a sculptor whose past few works have been fashioned out of stuff from a hardware shop: sinks, pipes, commodes. Each one she covers in rich, luxuriant red and turquoise velvet. From these, arise a body of work that regurgitates the many kinds of violence in Indian society everywhere, from communal to intellectual.

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Last year, Delhi and Mumbai saw ‘Ways of Resisting’, a show curated by artist Vivan Sunderam, where artists put up narratives of violence, resisting and speaking up. Currently, perhaps the most striking work is by Zarina Hashmi, a New York-based artist who is showing her woodcuts at Delhi’s Gallery Espace. In her multi-part work, Zarina makes maps of countries fragmented by violence: Chechnya, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Holy Land, the United States and, finally, India. In these works, she peels off the skin of reportage to delve into lands ruthlessly changed, their old selves finished.

The irony is that what binds these diverse art practitioners is that which they all desire the least. The unfolding of violence is so enormous, wide and difficult to imagine as a whole, that one can take in only small glimpses. Thus, Anita’s works contain an element of sardonic subversion, while Zarina maps out the frighteningly quotidian nature of violence. And Miguel pulls out the trembling violence from the seemingly placid.

These artists don’t have to be ‘activists’. And it doesn’t have to be only these issues they deal with. Yet, the fact that artists have been working on the theme is fearsome, because it drives home how cushioned and vulnerable most of us in the new global world are.

But it is also an indication that it can be and needs to be resisted. Artists do this by producing powerful works that are able to communicate with their intended audiences. In the 20th century, artists like the German Genius Max Ernst mocked the fascist regime in their paintings. Ernst himself painted a dancing demon, shaped like a swastika. Now, as the changed world is still fluid, we find these and other artists using imagery of the undesirable to nudge us into believing that another world is possible.