Catalogue Exhibition: AIFACS-DELHI
02/02/1997 , By Narendra Kumar Oberoi
These pictures in black and white are about men and women in a hurry. In their craze for speed their faces go hazy. They become their footsteps. These pictures catch the footsteps on an escalator in an underground railway tube, as part of the hectic traffic of a busy London or Paris square or the feet peddling a rickshaw. Between their footsteps and themselves falls the shadow, a blankness which marginalizes them. Tiptoeing on their margins they are distanced from the center (if there is any) of their existence. They experience the sensation of their movement, its tempo, its pace, its panic in its ritual and routine character and what it reduces them to; an amorphous mass. They become faceless.
Diwan Manna captures in these pictures this “becoming of their’s” the facelessness in its gradual, yet inescapable correspondence between loss of face and their absorption in speed. An interesting aspect of this facelessness Manna works out in the pictures of men and women pacing up and down in the undulating space of the high walled museums. What strikes on most is the spatial telescoping of the eternity of the art-works and fragility of existence of those viewing them. The viewers become the view and the art objects, the viewers. The passerby and the mannequins in a square are thrown into relief as it were by the presence of a solitary bird not far away. A host of cooks in a kitchen of a Dhaba or a restaurant have their faces intact about them in spite of or because of their sweating brows. These pictures are not only about speed, alienation and dehumanization i.e. life becoming mechanical, opaque and depersonalized. These pictures speak to us, in fact, of the disturbing questions which Diwan Manna is coming to terms with.
