Body Building: Ishara Art Foundation
Installation view of works by Ram Rahman, from the series Bioscope: Scenes from an Eventful Life2008, in the exhibition Body Building at Ishara Art Foundation. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Ismail Noor/Seeing Things.
The poster-boy for Ishara Art Foundation’s current exhibition is Dara Singh, arguably one of the most famous Indian sportsmen of all time. A real-life superhero and star of the vernacular, Dara Singh was a Pehlwani and professional wrestler whose image was plastered onto huge billboards ahead of his fights, giving him an iconic and legendary status. It is fitting then, that an image of one of these billboards, towering over a street-side fence should adorn the cover of the catalogue for Body Building. Much as Singh represented far more than the fights he won, in this instance, Singh’s image is a decoy for what lies beneath.
“The title is a play on words,” explains Nada Raza, the in-house curator at Ishara, Dubai’s non-profit space dedicated to South Asian art. “My focus is looking at the South Asian body and identity in relation to urbanisation and architecture of the Gulf region as well as recognising that the South Asian body is a feature of the Gulf city that sometimes gets occluded or written about in very stereotypical ways.”
The show comprises 16 practices from across South Asia all based in landscape, documentary and photographic art. As a whole, the exhibition spans a large time frame – from the 1960s until today – and examines the idea of the urban dream both in utopian and dystopian forms. Through careful selection, Raza has highlighted the aspirations of a so-called modern life for those who have historically flocked to cities and simultaneously addressed themes of economic transformation, architectural development as well as life in private and public spaces.
Untitled, 2018. Rajyashri Goody. Image courtesy of the artist and Ishara Art Foundation.
Opening with an introduction of the work of Ram Rahman, whose images of street life from the 1980s and 1990s include the striking portrait of Dara Singh that opens up the conversation about identity and physical presence, the show continues with the work of Rajyashri Goody, a young Indian photographer whose project Eat With Great Delight disseminates the caste-based stigmas that still exist in modern India.
From here, Abdul Halik Azeez (perhaps better known by his social media handle of @colombedouin) takes up the thread and captures viewers’ attention with his 10-minute video diary of six months in his native Colombo. Raza describes Azeez as a “digital citizen” who uses Instagram as his tool to investigate the visual narratives most prevalent in the world today. His video, made of a kaleidoscope of otherwise unremarkable everyday scenes, almost resembles the visual assault we so often subject ourselves to as we rapidly scroll through the social media app. To me, it feels like a walk, jaunt or stroll through Azeez’s own memory banks. “I am interested in how we memorialise digitally as opposed to physically,” he says. “The work stems from a compulsive obsession with images that produced a massive archive that I now realise I can use in a different way.”
Abdul Halik Azeez (perhaps better known by his social media handle of @colombedouin) stands next to his video installation Pics or It Didn’t Happen (2016) at Ishara Art Foundation. Image taken by Anna Seaman.
In the centre of the gallery, architecture and the built environment take centre stage with Randhir Singh’s Water Towers project and Arthur Crestani’s Bad City Dreams riffing off each other to create a dialogue about public spaces and human interaction. Singh’s typological series of Delhi’s numerous water towers are shot as portraits and reveal themselves as a social study sketching out a different narrative to the city. Their odd and mismatched appearances draw attention to nearby housing colonies and other infrastructure, which tells a story of the modernisation of India. Crestani’s interest is specific to one southern suburb of Delhi – Gurgaon. He has made large banners of proposed real-estate projects for the suburb and then invited passers-by to pose for portrait-style theatrical photographs with the banners. The interplay of imagination and reality, modernisation and decay, need and desire are cleverly captured with the presentation of these two practices.
Installation view of works by Randhir Singh and Arthur Crestani in the exhibition Body Building at Ishara Art Foundation. Photo by Ismail Noor/Seeing Things. From left: Randhir Singh, Water Towers 2015-2016. Courtesy of the artist. Arthur Crestani. Bad City Dreams 2017. Courtesy of the artist
The heart of the show, according to Raza, are a set of two videos shot by Pramod Pati, a filmmaker who lived and worked in Bombay (Mumbai) in the 1960s. The short films that he made were commissioned by the Films Division of India and were publicly screened. The aim was to deliver awareness and socially progressive messages to the “new” Indian. In one of the films titled Six, Five, Four, Three, Two (1968) a young couple go into a concrete high rise building, which is still under construction and imagine their future life in this building. The other Trip/Udan (1970) uses time-lapse photography to show the city as a prosperous metropolis. “These films are the heart of the show for me,” says Raza. “They have been in my mind for a long time and they are from where my thinking of the show develops. It strikes me that the ideas of high rise living and progress being measured by the growth of the nuclear family were being planted in India in late 60s but these are the lives that we now live in the Gulf.”
Installation view of Umber Majeed Memories Fade...Photographs Shouldn’t (2009-2016) in the exhibition Body Building at Ishara Art Foundation. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Ismail Noor/Seeing Things.
If Pati’s films represent the peak of utopian urban living within the exhibition then the combination of Umber Majeed’s installation and Zahra Malkani and Shahana Rajani’s joint video work Jinnah Avenue (2018) symbolise the dystopian result of these ideas becoming a reality. Majeed’s work uses archival photographs of Islamabad – Pakistan’s planned capital – to document and animate the construction of the Faisal Mosque as a commentary on forced social constructs in a dream-like and sentimental fashion. The duo of filmmakers behind Jinnah Avenue (2018) also focus on contemporary development through footage of a housing project in Karachi. Both pieces are slightly subliminal, reverent as well as critical and present a fascinating balance to the other video works in the space.
Although all shot and sourced in South Asia, this exhibition focuses on the sometimes-uncanny resemblances to Gulf life as well as commenting on the universal issue of dislocation, migration and movement. This is a fascinating glimpse into socioeconomic shifts and real politick inside a vast and nuanced region. An unmissable treat.
Body Building. September 12 - December 7, 2019. Ishara Art Foundation, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai.