SALT OF MY MIND

‘What is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would.’ These words from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland weirdly strike you long after you have seen this exhibition. Before, though, you are oblivious in your presumptions. ‘Christ!’ You murmur under your breath, partly because of the vapors of the humid day and partly because you subconsciously guess everything that you are about to encounter. NGMA Bangalore in collaboration with the Seagull Foundation for the Arts, Kolkata has the self-taught Indian artist Madhvi Parekh’s ‘The Last Supper’ on show, which is inspired mainly by Leonardo Da Vinci’s namesake and is a collection of Biblical tales rendered as reverse paintings on acrylic sheets. You nonchalantly recollect all the ‘last’ suppers you have seen, and apprehend exactly what you will witness as you step in to the gallery. But just as unexpectedly as Alice falls down the rabbit hole, you plummet into an emotional wonderland. The assumptions quickly cr

Into The Essence  What would it have been like if Virginia Woolf had been a dancer instead ? What would her words and ideas have looked like as movements ? I have long been possessed by these kind of thoughts, these sorts of unending contemplation. How does the 'idea' or the concept evolve and unfold in different art forms? Each Art form, with its technicalities and specific beauty, is (according to me) in the end a medium which communicates the idea, the emotion, or the concept. Whether the idea is a traditional/mythological/inherited one, or a (supposedly) original, it is still, to me as an artist, the essence of art. A figure painted a bluish tint, standing with legs crossed with a flute in the hands, is undeniably Krishna. Any (Indian) dancer that imitates this body language/gesture, is undoubtedly showing Krishna. Is not the dance an image here? Or the image the dance? With words, the particular combination of the seven letters 'Krishna' is, well,