‘Boatman-2’, 1988
KP Krishnakumar
Fibreglass sculpture
This sculpture by K. P. Krishnakumar takes the male body as its subject. Working in fibreglass, which he covered with cloth and plaster, the artist patinated and moulded its surface to resemble cast metal.
‘Boatman-2’ is a reworking of an earlier sculpture which perished in a fire. In both versions, a fisherman’s body melds with his boat.
Conjoined with the tool indispensable to his livelihood, the fisherman becomes a seemingly unfinished hybrid of man and machine, alluding to a destabilised personhood. The resultant figure is unreadable and impassive, gazing ahead at an imagined horizon. In his work, Krishnakumar sought to transcend regional, individual identity. Defying narrative and driven by the need to make art political, Krishnakumar’s work locates struggles of race and class in the universal body of the labourer.*
Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, a mode of figurative narrative painting gained prevalence as a second generation of post-independence artists grappled with the changing urban landscape and various social issues. There were also artists who worked outside of and at times rallied against these aesthetic parameters. Though they attested to the diversity of artistic practices operating in India at the time, not all received equal visibility or commendation. The Indian Radical Painters’ and Sculptors’ Association, formed at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda (Vadodara), had misgivings about the “bourgeois-centred Indian art world”. The association was led by K. P. Krishnakumar and most of its members had been initiated into leftist politics in their home state of Kerala. In Delhi, activist Safdar Hashmi, murdered in 1989, used street theatre as a form of protest and act of resistance. Savindra Sawarkar was unique in forming a distinct visual iconography to address the plight of the Dalit community. The motivation behind these artists’ practices was to expose the pervasive oppression and discrimination in Indian society, based on class and caste.*
Taken from the exhibition
The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998
(October 2024 — January 2025)
The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998 surveys artistic production from across the Indian subcontinent during a 23-year period marked by social upheaval, economic instability and rapid urbanisation. The exhibition unfolds in a loosely chronological manner, framed by two significant national events in the history of independent India: the declaration of the Emergency in 1975, when democratic rights were suspended, and the nuclear tests of 1998, when the country relinquished its non-violent ideals to assert its place in a new global order. Some artists responded unequivocally to developments in the public arena, while others captured shared experiences and private moments. Amongst the 30 artists featured in this show some committed themselves to representational painting; others evolved personal iconographies in a variety of mediums, including employing installation in the 1990s. All of them combined social observation with individual expression and innovative forms to make work about friendship, love, desire, family, religion, violence, caste and community. This has determined the four axes that shape the exhibition: the rise of communal violence; gender and sexuality; urbanisation and shifting class structures; and a growing connection with Indigenism.
The exhibition takes its title from Sudipta Kaviraj’s essay The Imaginary Institution of India, in which he writes persuasively about the intellectual process of conceptualising the Indian nation. Artworks consider the state’s inability to abide by the progressive character of its Constitution, conceived as an instrument for radical social transformation. They also confront government failure to uphold secularism, social justice, welfare, minority rights and affirmative action in the face of a rising Hindu right wing and pro-capitalist economic agendas. They demonstrate that solidarity and protest existed, and were expressed in many registers, from the strident or intimate to the despondent or poetic, both anguished and hopeful, in the street and in the home. We witness the quiet defiance and resilience which truly defines this imaginary institution of India. In the words of B. R. Ambedkar, the Indian Constitution’s main architect, “Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy.".
[*Barbican Centre]
Taken in the Barbican
‘Boatman-2’, 1988
KP Krishnakumar
Fibreglass sculpture
This sculpture by K. P. Krishnakumar takes the male body as its subject. Working in fibreglass, which he covered with cloth and plaster, the artist patinated and moulded its surface to resemble cast metal.
‘Boatman-2’ is a reworking of an earlier sculpture which perished in a fire. In both versions, a fisherman’s body melds with his boat.
Conjoined with the tool indispensable to his livelihood, the fisherman becomes a seemingly unfinished hybrid of man and machine, alluding to a destabilised personhood. The resultant figure is unreadable and impassive, gazing ahead at an imagined horizon. In his work, Krishnakumar sought to transcend regional, individual identity. Defying narrative and driven by the need to make art political, Krishnakumar’s work locates struggles of race and class in the universal body of the labourer.*
Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, a mode of figurative narrative painting gained prevalence as a second generation of post-independence artists grappled with the changing urban landscape and various social issues. There were also artists who worked outside of and at times rallied against these aesthetic parameters. Though they attested to the diversity of artistic practices operating in India at the time, not all received equal visibility or commendation. The Indian Radical Painters’ and Sculptors’ Association, formed at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda (Vadodara), had misgivings about the “bourgeois-centred Indian art world”. The association was led by K. P. Krishnakumar and most of its members had been initiated into leftist politics in their home state of Kerala. In Delhi, activist Safdar Hashmi, murdered in 1989, used street theatre as a form of protest and act of resistance. Savindra Sawarkar was unique in forming a distinct visual iconography to address the plight of the Dalit community. The motivation behind these artists’ practices was to expose the pervasive oppression and discrimination in Indian society, based on class and caste.*
Taken from the exhibition
The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998
(October 2024 — January 2025)
The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998 surveys artistic production from across the Indian subcontinent during a 23-year period marked by social upheaval, economic instability and rapid urbanisation. The exhibition unfolds in a loosely chronological manner, framed by two significant national events in the history of independent India: the declaration of the Emergency in 1975, when democratic rights were suspended, and the nuclear tests of 1998, when the country relinquished its non-violent ideals to assert its place in a new global order. Some artists responded unequivocally to developments in the public arena, while others captured shared experiences and private moments. Amongst the 30 artists featured in this show some committed themselves to representational painting; others evolved personal iconographies in a variety of mediums, including employing installation in the 1990s. All of them combined social observation with individual expression and innovative forms to make work about friendship, love, desire, family, religion, violence, caste and community. This has determined the four axes that shape the exhibition: the rise of communal violence; gender and sexuality; urbanisation and shifting class structures; and a growing connection with Indigenism.
The exhibition takes its title from Sudipta Kaviraj’s essay The Imaginary Institution of India, in which he writes persuasively about the intellectual process of conceptualising the Indian nation. Artworks consider the state’s inability to abide by the progressive character of its Constitution, conceived as an instrument for radical social transformation. They also confront government failure to uphold secularism, social justice, welfare, minority rights and affirmative action in the face of a rising Hindu right wing and pro-capitalist economic agendas. They demonstrate that solidarity and protest existed, and were expressed in many registers, from the strident or intimate to the despondent or poetic, both anguished and hopeful, in the street and in the home. We witness the quiet defiance and resilience which truly defines this imaginary institution of India. In the words of B. R. Ambedkar, the Indian Constitution’s main architect, “Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy.".
[*Barbican Centre]
Taken in the Barbican