Re-humanising Inquiry

Riyas Komu’s recent show, titled Grass*, was a suite photographs. Komu might be better known for his paintings and for the assemblages and sculptures that he designed for some recent shows, but he is rather a strategic visual artist. Grass was a part of this strategic, interventionist oeuvre. Komu, this time, chose to exhibit photographs that featured faces of adolescent boys and men in their twenties who work at a garage in his neighbourhood. A discerning viewer would remember Komu’s assemblages with used motorcycle parts. These were the boys who actually welded the parts. No doubt there was a sense of comraderie that charted a relationship between the artist and the boys. It was visible on the faces, the way they looked at Komu’s camera, with confidence and some kind of friendly eloquence in their eyes.

True, the relationship here was not equal, to begin with. The artist was from a ‘high’ social and economic class whereas the boys, low. What Komu has done as an observer of life and its implications, and more importantly as a rebel against those implications, is to defy and question the notions that define such inequalities. Who told you the boys were ‘lesser’? - the show asked a viewer. When you looked at each photograph and tended to stare at the eyes of a boy, behind the frozen photographic moment you saw signs life. A life that could have been full of troubles if measured and compared to the standard that we aggregate as living standards for a happy life. The world banks standards, by the WHO standards or even the rhetoric of Indian Constitution would disapprove the living conditions as unadvisable. Yet, the ease with which the boys carried themselves was a proof that they enjoyed life, wanted to enjoy it and as if, were sure to succeed.

What are their ideas of success? To own a garage, however small? To be employed as a driver with some big Seth? To go to ‘Dubai’, maybe? The pictures won’t speak up. Guesswork helps, in understanding that they must have had alternate sets of blueprints for a happy life. The show opened up these blueprints, and pointed to the historical as well as contemporary predicament of those who have to search for greener pasteurs. All this, when the Mumbai media have been anticipating the local political parties for an outburst against ‘outsiders’ to the city.

In strict photographic parlance, they were all Portrait busts. To overcome the classification and the prescriptive package of appreciation, the artist had employed a different technique : to print the photographs with all their sharpness, but in undertones. On a matt-finish archival paper, the gray, sometimes green undertone shades would invite an inquiry that precedes appreciation. The distance that the tonal loss attributed to these pictures was to be overcome by you, the viewer. Existence, here, was clearer than the object. All the pictures had names of the boys, but they were seldom legible. What would a white letter, on a five percent black look like? This technical strategy was congruent with their supposed namelessness.

The leftist-romanticist ‘style’ of demonizing the work conditions and then searching for a domesticated protagonist or an untamed hero has come a long way. The artist as a researcher has accepted the role of participant observer. Participant, in so far as s/he interacts with people or a group and then charts a strategy that re-thinks observations with a larger audience with due respect to human existence. For Komu, the humane re-orientation has been inherent since the days when he was an undergraduate art student. Not a PR statement by the artist, this. It is just a recollection by a writer who has seen Komu for last 8-odd years, when the latter struggled mend the ways within the JJ School of Art, Mumbai. With every work, since then, Komu has demonstrated his ability to re-humanise social-political inquiry, although his focal length differed every time.

I’d think of this show not as an exhibition that waited for applause. The success of Grass was that, it made Riyas Komu’s notes public.
-- abhijeet tamhane
* Grass : Riyas Komu, Guild Art Gallery.

The polemicist – turned- orator

Canopies and calligraphy, domes and decorative motifs… pots and coffins, burns and bullets… Riyas Komu entwined them in his recent show, with what seems to be an unending column - of religion and rivalry, piety and predation. The show at Mumbai's Sakshi Gallery in April-May, was called 'Faith Accompli', a title that had a smell of dreaded dreams and doom. Komu drew home the quandary of the debate over faith and power. The culture-specific forms that Komu conceptualized had the strength of addressing the universal. Komu's visual language attained new oratorial heights.

Komu's language has evolved with empathy toward objects which are closer to life (or death). It has not only valued precision and perspective but also materiality and measure. It has been with Komu since he was a student. Be it the red pots and photo frames or the use of tarpauline in "he used to believe EMS planted all the coconut trees in Kerala" (1998), his later engagement with watching news channels to distill the most evocative faces of commoners who have to bear the brunt, and the later experiments with the 'garage boys' at Borivli (also a part of his photographic work), who once facilitated his use of motorcycle parts that suggested a deconstructed human body. Lately, Komu used metal forms that directly denoted a religion or a party. These works form the base of his current language, where volume is as important as content. The size and repetition that adds to the volume were never used so directly by Komu, before 2005. In the current show, 'the Third Day' the scale of tin walls competes the frightening prison-cells, while the oversized, heavy wooden communion chalises evoke assurance and suspicion alike. The decorations on the canopies reach disturbing hights. ' My Fathers' Balcony' takes the myth of Noah's Arc in its stride. The repetition of red coffins and charred, holed pots make a high-pitched demand for something more than a second or a third look. The blood-red, coffin-shaped forms on the wall sport the sheen of a car you (wanted to/) own, and as you watch the' Tragedy of a carpenter's Son', your eyes feel the pale- cold touch of bare galvanized tin with its occasional corrosions.

With such content that intrigues the intellectually honest and commands emotional reflex, Komu has always been a polemicist. In the previous years, he took on the overlapping tasks of an interpreter, interrogator and advocate. Oratory comes with volume and pitch, which he has obtained now. Will this quality lead him to a major public art piece or will he be content with galleries and biennales, remains to be seen.

- abhijeet tamhane.