Catalogue: Exhibition Wheel of Time-Alliance Francaise Chandigarh
12/20/2000 , By Narendra Kumar Oberoi
Walking on it is what we associate with the road. The movement is all. We are moving all the time. We are alive to the extent we are moving. We come across cars, bicycles and moving feet in these pictures.
I am alive. See my forms of life, the road proclaims in these pictures. See me at Berlin. I encompass the Check-Point-Charlie which once divided the East and the West. See me at the shopping plazas, traffic roundabouts, busy crossings, railway tubes at Paris, London, Berlin, New York, Amsterdam and Stockholm. Could you see the wilderness hiding in the empty spaces in between the sky-scrapers, the golden hue of the fallen leaves on my metaled, chipped, plastered and rough surfaces all around. Do you see the chiaroscuro of darkness and light on me. See how the human beings negotiate with me. How they state their identity on their desire to keep moving. Time, they say you go. But no, you stay we go.
The bicycle wheel recurs in many pictures. At a time we are focused on satellite superhighways, the parked bicycle in the ambience of the Eiffel Tower and the sign-post of a pedestrian nearby is Diwan Manna’s way of keeping our feet on the ground. Along with the rows of parked cars he shows queue of human beings on the move. Human beings, however amorphous and ill-defined, are the central concern of his photography. In the ebb and flow of dailiness of life these pictures arrest the time and the timeless at the same time. While we are looking at them we participate in the history in the making.
