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Review
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Jagannatha Panda: Action of Nowhere
‘Action of Nowhere,’ solo exhibition by Jagannath Panda was held at Nature Morte, New Delhi recently. Suruchi Khubchandani traces the artist’s aesthetical querries.
(1) It is the world which makes known to us our belongings to a subject-community, especially the existence in the world, of manufactured objects. These objects have been worked on by men for they - subjects; that is, for a non-individualised and unnumbered transcendence which coincides with the undifferentiated look which we called earlier the ‘They.’
(2)Everything which may be said in my relations with the Other applies to him as well. While I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other, the Other seeks to enslave me. We are by no means dealing with unilateral relations with an object-in-itself, but with reciprocal and moving relations.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
It is a stance of universal, conscious journey. The band of visibilities and statements comprise the field of visual formulation in Jagannatha Panda’s ‘The Action of Nowhere.’ An eloquent solo in the stream of many in artist’s oeuvre seemingly witnessed activity from August 14th to September 5th 2009 at Nature Morte, New Delhi.
Panda’s erstwhile solo, ‘Nothing is Solid,’ comprising of paintings and sculptural installations was held in 2007. Over the short span of two years, Panda affirmatively repositions his enquiries drawing forth an ‘Action of Nowhere’ for his audience. It’s an ‘audience’ because a brief glance at Panda’s works unfolds a spectacle. At one platform of the gallery, a life-size rhinoceros crunches an overstuffed iron trunk with the force of his feet, while a little away you are greeted by another trunk, looking a dilapidated and worn out, housing a huge, hemispherical honeycomb. Or must it be said that did you see the skeletal tree called ‘Home Plant’ standing within the white cube-like space, accommodated conveniently in a planter pot, swaying in a transitional mode from the jungle tree to an urban potted plant. We can guess that the wild parrot is perching on the tree to mediate his sedate position. Stuck in some other end is an egg nest upholstered with seemingly abandoned twigs, wild feathers and an anomalous city-bred stick.
Panda’s aesthetic trail spurs enquiries in various directions. A substantial insight can be drawn regarding both matter and technique. A personal aesthetic sensibility functions throughout Panda’s art, both as a balancing device and an interrogating agent. The paradoxes of the urban-rural, natural-manmade, earthed soil-concrete, traditional-contemporary become the foremost matter of Panda’s aesthetic creations. Evident is a state of a rupture, uncannily juxtaposed substances, and eerily positioned and shaped structures resembling piths, kernels, nubs and other repositories of obscured meanings. Picking bits and pieces from sundry places that constitute the assortments and count of his sculptural installations, Panda in the process, delves into the historical formations of the cultures and geographies of the people who nurture them and the land which breeds these functions.
Animals become a major motive in the artist’s visual vocabulary, signifying the capacity of these creatures to perform the role of mediating natural forces vis-à-vis the human existence. A dual contingency is apparent as the beasts of the wild have witnessed a discordant transferal of their base from the natural to the man-made environs. The eccentric ‘in-between’ disposition of the animals also points to the inevitable repercussion that the avaricious urban society poses with an insensitivity towards the wildlife habitats and values of indigenous communities. A similar disjunction appears to validate its consequences on the human life. The event of migration itself poses questions of belonging to a place and sustaining a living else where. Panda’s readabilities assume autobiographical tone, the artist having subsisted both as a rural migrant and as a city dweller. Moving from his native place Orissa in 1995, Panda has been witness to the tremendous changes the city of Delhi and his present living space has undergone.
This shift has steadily cultivated within Panda a language of alienation that is paradoxically contained within images of settlement. He also made the transition from sculpture and installations to painting, exploiting the possibility of narrative unfoldment that the medium affords. Besides the sculptures, his paintings colligate as a referential link to the dominant three-dimensional whole. The ‘Failure of Faith,’ ‘Fatal Sublime,’ and ‘The Lost Site’ conjure up images of the mishap-struck cars rammed to an extent that Panda splits out of them dry outgrowths of the thin stems and leaves spread out in a circular order emulating a large crack. It might seem rather a crash into the trees but a deeper understanding of his concerns postulates the confirmation of urbanism as invasive poison. A shift with subtle rhythm is seen in an enigmatic or surreal jostle in ‘The Action of Nowhere’ between the explosions of deer, paisley leaves, stems curled to arabesque pattern gushing in and out of an abysmal space, aptly as title states known to no one.
There is a continuation in terms of the executed technique to his earlier solo ‘Nothing is Solid,’ an adept employment of the fine and glossy fabric material and colours maneuvered to bestow an enigmatic feel to the sculptural installations. Underscoring the importance of material, Panda remains cautious of the underlying message he is disseminating. For him, these artificial yet alluring fabrics are an equal counterpart of the affluent lifestyle and hence constitute the second skin of the urban body. Panda, with an ingenious combination and embellishment, handles kitsch without making it sense loud or eclipsing any of the sought agendas. Rather, apart from the famous goats that seconded the name of Panda, the much-slick brocade, and velvet strips has become artist’s signature now. Or I bet, the most stunning black velvet bat hung upside down in one of the gallery’s corner might not have flared wings while your gaze were on. If not, you would mind not catch it here slipping in one of the images.
(Suruchi Khubchandani is an art writer based in Delhi. She has done M.V.A. in Art History & Aesthetics from M.S.University, Baroda. Email: sur14in@gmail.com)
