Exhibition Catalogue:Shrewsbury Museum-UK
06/07/1997 , By Narendra Kumar Oberoi
WAKING THE DEAD
Here are floating images of death, the fantasies we weave around it. At the center of these pictures is a figure of a woman in outline fleshed out and bare at times, an appearance, an illusion. In the last picture in the series she seems to be fading into a tunnel- which marks the passage from life to death. Death is not a physical event but a symbolic reality we keep hovering around. Through the gestures and movements of the figure Diwan sketches our inner cravings, fears and desires our love of life in stages of our unwilling journey to the tunnel. The contours of the figure in and outside the shroud, fixed with the nails around it, with dead flowers on her body make life an airy nothing evaporating while decaying. Hiding flowers in the face of a battle tank the female figure becomes our smothered sensitivity in the face of destruction. There is a bird in these pictures which could be a sparrow, an eagle or a crow who is a constant witness, a companion or a victim. The soft and somber density of golden brown, transient blue and deadly green create our inner world with its evanescent and thinning into the air character.
The ambiance Diwan creates is intimate as well as alienating. One feels transported, as it were on the shores of the unknown. The unknown could be the expanse of your private memory, the darkness of your collective unconscious, your contemporary history – your living environment and often the intersection of these spaces. What marks out each picture is the coloring of the imagination, its tone and depth which characterize the complex emotions death evokes in us.
These pictures distance you from your immediate environment into a space which is harrowing as well as fascinating. Fascinating because it confronts you as an achievement; the sedateness of a stormy sea shaping into the facets of death in it ambivalent relationship with us. Aren’t we dead many a time when we think we are alive? Diwan often mentions an uncle of his who lived most of the time in the cremation ground and could, he believed like other children of his age, wake up the dead. Whether his mythological uncle did or did not, he seems to be doing it in these pictures, waking us up t the living reality of death.
