Museums Journal-Berlin
04/18/2002 , By Raffael Dedo Gadebusch
(English translation from German)
New acquisitions at the Museum for Indian Art.
Since its reopening in October 2000, the Museum for Indian art has emphasized the main points in regards to its concept as a museum of Non-European Art in 21st century. Above all the contemporary Art of Indo-Asiatic cultural region, which was getting a step motherly treatment up to now, would henceforth be promoted consciously. The new and contemporary Art of south and Southeast Asia would attract special attention.
A long-term project that shall serve the purpose of approaching the modern and latest tendencies in the contemporary Indian Art is taking place in curator co-operation with the bi-yearly conducted Asia-pacific-Weeks. Beside the traditional genre -painting and sculpture -the viewpoint should be extended to other forms of expression of the art. The Photography makes hereby a main focus, which, at the moment, is getting a more important status in India although it has not still received the same unveiling as has been received in Europe since the last decade of the 20th Century. Indian Photographers are continuously engaged in an exchange of views with their society. This is happening in the area of conflict between the traditions of Indian culture that are still deep rooted and the globalization in India which is obviously coming up. Photographer Diwan Manna, who was born in 1958, and is living in Chandigarh, belongs to the new generation of those much- promising Photo-Artists to whom the Museum for Indian Art has dedicated a special exhibition in the Year 2000. The subjects as well as the techniques used prove that Diwan Manna is thoroughly versatile and takes pleasure in doing experiments. Three themes cover the works of the Artist as a central leitmotif: Alienation, Violence and the debate with death and
Reincarnation.
The Museum for Indian Art has bought the works from all three picture types. The small-sized, black and white works of the series "Alienation" from the year 1980 pick up the universal theme of Alienation. Manna`s employment of the conventional technique may, at the first sight, appear to be suggesting that the presented situations are dealing with production, which indeed represents a conscious deviation from the great tradition of the socio-critical Photography on the part of the artist. The photo is framed and finally photographed again.
This double alienation of a traditional view of photography has "finestra aperta" from the reality as characteristic for most works of Manna. A morally pointing finger is never discernible. On the contrary, a rather thoughtful laconic picture of the social reality emerges from Manna`s compositions, which betrays the Asiatic aspects of the photographer. Besides, the beauty of some of the photographic paintings lends somewhat deeper ambiguity to the title
"Alienation". Is it the alienation of humans by an apparently completely senseless work, as of that small boy, who ekes out his miserable existence as "Clerk" in a Bank, always present, condemned to "being there", or of those men, who prepare Indian sweets in a room bereft of day light in intolerable heat? Or it is perhaps, completely different type of alienation, which deals with the thought of alienation of the represented work by the artist with the help of produced photography? Manna does not only play the authenticity of the represented work by its productions in question, he plays with it and makes another reality level visible. And doesn`t alienation result also straight from the apparent authenticity of a realistic photography?
The pictures of the Gulf War or the collapsing World Trade Centre are somewhat oppressive visual for a not so involved viewer. Manna`s, only at the first sight, socio-critical photographic works are full of strong feelings for beauty and virtue, which leaves behind the prominent aspect of the alienation through the personal fate of the one, "only in western understanding appreciated work completely into the background. A compository masterpiece is the 1987 developed work "Dhaba", which is related to the series "Alienation". It shows a group of men, who have stopped their work in order to be photographed by the viewer but there is nothing as a pose in these figures. The picture is snap and still appears fully natural -at least to us it looks like that. This is possible only to the efficient view of the great photographer, who has the patience, to wait for that decisive moment", sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, as told once by the photographer Herbert List. As far as naturalness in the expression is concerned, Manna differs fundamentally from Yusuf Karsh and other prominent-photographers, who attached great importance to the compository aspect in the photography.
The composition of the figures standing next to each other and handling the effect of light in this work stands particularly nearer to the tradition of the paintings of the 17th Century, and allude to works of Caravaggios. Here Manna shows the glimpse of his intensive discussion with the European paintings; "his handwriting and his view are, however, Indian. Also the pictures of series of "Shores of the Unknown" are produced, here however, completely obvious. These works are to be understood, likewise, only in the context of that particular cycle. Manna creates "single works" only rarely. The conceptual character of his series is not weakened by his clear inclination to the figures. Abstractions in his photographs result through alienation. Here the medium of photography offers infinite possibilities, which the painter hardly has at his disposal. In other series, the artist uses very intensively the medium of painting and of over painting. However, the last step of developing process is always the "shooting". Manna succumbs to the fascination of manipulation and reproductibility of the medium and remains therefore, faithful to the two- dimensional surface, although from his works, through the effect of overlaying, occasionally, a three dimensional effect emerges. This applies particularly to the expressive and colored works with the title "Waking the Dead", which represent a continuation to the series of "Shores of the Unknown". The effect of sticking, to the symbols of this work cycle comes, however, more strongly in the monochromes, the technically lesser alienated works to expression. The white-membranous woman body discernible under the translucent clothes have an effect in contrast, irritatingly transparent and
fragile, to the raw wood planks. Manna relates the topic of that and reincarnation always current in the Hindustani context, in his work of 1996 with the very current topics of virtuality and reproductibility of the human body. Parallels between his works and the current works of Swiss photographer Ms. Katrin Freisager come to the fore. Freisagers white-membranous floating beings from the series of "to be like you", which can be seen under the exhibition contemporary photo art from Switzerland up to the end of the year in Germany, makes clear, like our globalized world promotes a universal consciousness of sticking to the symbol, which is likewise expressed in the works of the Indian artist as in the works of the young European Contemporary.
Raffael Dedo Gadebusch
Author is Deputy Director of the Museum for Asian Art, Berlin, Germany
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