Curator Ripu Daman brings back the visionary literature of Albert Camus through art that instinctively depicts the human condition. By Uma Nair
The India Art Fair 2019 will see a brilliant curation by young designer and thinker Ripu Daman at the Art Indus booth. Daman extols the verbal philosophy and intentions of the ageless Albert Camus in a curation that includes stellar artists like Himmat Shah, Rameshwar Broota, Rajendra Tiku, Norio Takaoka, Amitava Das, Vasundhara Tewari Broota, Neeraj Bakshy, Nidhi Khurana, Anish Tiku and R Erdjnz.
Says Daman, “The exhibition engages in pristine visual dialogue with the visionary literature of Albert Camus as it brings to view works that instinctively depict the human condition. The exhibition draws great relevance from Camus’s humanitarian quest as he looked for genuine realities behind the order of things, positing a world integrated with nature, seeking balance within the web of complicities extant to a civilised world. The exhibition endeavors to cross-examine our contemporaneity in light of the viewpoints that Camus left us within a lifetime of beauty and servitude.”
He goes further into the work and thoughts of Camus and adds that it is the writer-philosopher’s first images that definitively bring to mind the predicament of ‘being.’ What Camus submits to us in The Outsider, perhaps one of the most cogent introspections into the heart of the human-condition, exposing our existence ‘cut off from a sense of God, in benign indifference of the Universe’ — a stark realisation of the absurdity that is life. Sartre and Heidegger have examined this predicament as a “transphenomenality of being” — a nothingness “where things overflow all the relationships and designations which we attach to them and ‘being’ in general and existence in particular is de trop (superfluous)”; “being existent one cannot escape this original contingency, this obscene superfluity” — a “Being for-itself,” with no outside purpose to give it meaning or direction”; a thrown projection of “Being.” This is akin to what Heidegger refers to as Dasein (as in Being-there-in-the-world). Rameshwar Broota and Rajendra Tiku’s works have always contemplated the “Being” in a sense of the contrapositive, as a sublime weakening from universal to particular, a perspective of the omniscient narrator: of light or time, like God-searching humans.
However it is Himmat Shah, Rajendra Tiku and Neeraj Bakshy who excel in the strata of the signature of Being. Daman aptly quotes Jean Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” to echo the ideation. “Being-in-itself” is never either possible or impossible. This is what consciousness expresses in anthropomorphic terms by saying that being is superfluous, that consciousness absolutely cannot derive being from anything, either from another being, or from a possibility, or from a necessary law. Un-created, without reason for being, without any connection with another being, being-in-itself is de trop for eternity.”
Of course, when you look at Tiku’s work, you think of the associations and aspirations that add meaning and momentousness to the sensibility of creating. Dummy and the Paper Bird 1980, created out of ink and vegetable stain on paper, has about it an ecological connotation as well as a traversing of the past when you look at the year it was created in. Tiku, the sterling sculptor who has created silent soliloquies in sculpture, is a refreshing read in terms of what he can offer the viewer on a winter’s day. Study for the Grey Areas of a Public Hydrant is another work that catches your gaze for its subtle signature of narrative and soothing tranquility even as the image brings across a corollary of conversations that flash through the tides of time.
Then there is Himmat Shah’s Untitled (Kali 2006) and Neeraj Bakshy’s Smelling the Roses, two works that make us stop and think of all things amorphous and articulate in art’s many realms.