Sudarshan Shetty probes life and its dimensions at upcoming Ishara show

Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

“Dear Muhammad,” says the email from Asavari Sehgal, Press and Communications Manager of Ishara Art Foundation at Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, “excited to share that we are working with renowned Indian artist Sudarshan Shetty for Ishara’s upcoming solo exhibition titled Only Life, Myriad Places (Aug. 25 – Dec. 9). The exhibition celebrates the global premiere of his latest film One Life Many and marks the first survey of Shetty’s moving image works, featuring multi-media installations and sculptures.”

“Sudarshan is best known,” the email continues, “for his large sculptural installations and multi-media works and has exhibited widely around the world including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Tate Modern (London) and Centre Pompidou (Paris), to name a few. He also curated the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2016. I think he would be an interesting voice to highlight from the Global South, given his dynamic and interdisciplinary practice.” Of course Muhammad is interested in highlighting his work – keenly too, given that Shetty is one of the better known Indian artists.

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Blurring boundaries between dreams and wakefulness, memories and fantasies, objects and spectres, his works explore the transient and ever-changing nature of things. In Only Life, Myriad Places, he attempts to take one on a journey into the labyrinths of the mind, captured through moving images and elaborate mise en scenes. Places, people and stories that seem familiar become estranged here and viewers are invited to contemplate whether the films are a depiction of someone’s dream, or if they are being dreamt by the film’s characters.

The Ishara exhibition features eight significant works from Shetty’s considerable oeuvre, presenting his deep interest in the musical and literary traditions of South Asia. Videos, images, objects and texts have a fleeting presence in the repertoire, as if they were musical notes that lead to a “poetics of listening.” One Life, Myriad Places is a call to feel the world in multiple ways. It opens with an untitled sculptural installation, comprising six pairs of water vessels displayed in a glass vitrine. The metallic pots are accompanied by their mirror replica, sculpted in wood. The installation could resemble percussive instruments, or it could be an abstract composition of progressive scales, or a duet of bodies resting silently together.

  A woman journeys alone in a still from One Life Many.

A chamber of melancholic music plays on the sarangi, a South Asian stringed instrument. Waiting for Others to Arrive is a single channel video that explores the philosophical conundrums of life and death. It is followed by Shetty’s most recent and ambitious film, One Life Many. Drawing from a mediaeval Indian myth of a sage who transforms into another being and back again, the work raises the age-old question about how there can be one true self, when we also carry a multitude of selves inside us.

Produced in 2022 when the world emerged slowly from the pandemic, the film resituates the myth into a contemporary world that was reawakening after a long period of isolation and introspection. Further into the exhibition is a grouping of three artworks that include an untitled installation with prints, a single channel video titled The Juggler, and a text.

The Juggler depicts a man juggling three earthen pots in slow-motion. Reminiscent of several traditions in India where the pot is a symbol for the body, Shetty too refers to its meaning as a vessel for prana, the life-force shared by all living things. The untitled text leads into the next work, a two-channel video titled A Song A Story. Inspired from a popular folktale from South India and sung in Braj Bhasha (a western Hindustani language), the narrative unfolds around a woman who has held onto her song and her story for a long time.

Age of Love is a multi-media installation consisting of selections from Hindustani Classical music, where six intergenerational singers string together elaborate renditions in praise of love and its fragile and ungraspable nature. Only Life, Myriad Places is an artistic homage to the rich and diverse traditions of music, literature and storytelling that have journeyed for centuries. The exhibition will be accompanied by physical and virtual tours, educational and public programmes, and artist conversations over the duration of the show, as is the norm in Ishara.

Shetty says this about his show: “Like in the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East has a captivating tradition of poetry and storytelling deeply entrenched in its history. The interaction between these two distant lands has fostered a cross-pollination of stories, which has resulted blending of myths, legends and folktales, creating a vibrant mosaic that resonates through both regions. Retelling is the life blood of oral traditions ensuring a sense of community and recalling wisdom that has evolved through centuries. How else can we make sense of our present?”

He was born in 1961 and currently lives and works in Mumbai. As a conceptual artist, he is renowned for enigmatic works created from hybrid constructions, mechanical apparatuses and multi-media compositions, fusing Indian and Western traditions. His works are unlikely – but effective - juxtapositions of forms that belong to vastly distinct cultural spheres. He has held solo exhibitions in institutions and galleries that include the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Fukuoka), Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum (Mumbai) and Galerie Daniel Templon (Brussels). His works are a part of public and private art collections that include the Devi Art Foundation, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, the Vanhaerents Art Collection, the Ishara Art Foundation and The Prabhakar Collection.