Vanitas Vanitaum a show curated by Peter Nagy

... omnia vanitas?

The props played lead role and Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai was the stage.
Curator Peter Nagy, who flew late August from Delhi to Mumbai, prefered to call the show 'a curated installation'. Mumbaiites will remember this show, Vanitas Vanitaum, as much forNagy's communicative essay, his eye on detail, as for the the artists and their work.

While the show dealt with the 'props' : a consumerist proposition, it seemed to address a post-consumerist situation. The artists : Atul Dodiya, Bose Krishnamachari, Anita Dube, Subodh Gupta, Mario D'Souza, Bharti Kher, Arun Kumar H.G., Samit Das, and Dayanita Singh, subverted the old concept of 'vanitas vanitatum' (vanity of vanities, here understood as ' the objects included in official portraits of royalty and nobility ') to what they saw as today. The show could easily fall into traps of nostalgia, but it didn't. Instead, it had multiple energies, with as many analyses. Nagy the curator emphasises their diverse formal pursuits as 'inexhaustible source of associations'.

The associations, within the Vanitas Vanitatum, ranged from Atul Dodiyas work evoking memory of the 'lost' Fathers, with his use of Radio-sets and such other middle-class props in the 1950s-60s; to the neo- art deco bedroom that flaunts everything goes in it (rubberized coir wall-panels and flooring, a hyper-ergonomic bed, with matching sidetables and wall-clock, a Bose painting and a bookshelf with
no-nonsese art-books gifted by authors or artists... even detailed thingies like a bra-panty 'just lying there' or the wine glasses et al) . While Dayanita Singh's lens pans over an array of interiors, Samit Das focuses on "looking back in order to look forward" tophotographs from the Tagore house. The photographs encounter with
Subodh Gupta's punch of Male egocentricity, Bharti Kher's animal tales with a human sting-tail, Arun Kumar's bizarre toys and an impossible please-all Chai-kettle, Anita Dube's military-comoflauged oven and Safe (Tijori) filed with utensils, rupees and bones alike!

An interior full of subversions, here, subverted the gaze! the black and white notions about form and function plunged into the gray areas of who vanitates him/herself, why and how. The search for answers begins with the show, without leading to a frustrated dead-end of 'Omnia Vanitas' (all is vanity). Instead, it celebrates the diversity of Vanitas vanitatum ad infinitum!

-- abhijeet tamhane, Mumbai, september 2004.