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UP, CLOSE AND PERSONAL
MARK HIM: Riyas Komu
‘Up Close and Personal’ is a shared diagram locating lives of significant figures in Contemporary Indian Art over the last four decades. The locus of this diagram is drafted through first person accounts, situations, art works, projects, events, texts, issues, people, cultures and geographies thereby trying to articulate an art context that is simultaneously personal and historical. In this edition of ‘Up, Close and Personal,’ Dr.Kavitha Balakrishnan approaches the works of the contemporary Indian artist Riyas Komu.)
Instead of simply endorsing or rejecting all of identity politics ‘simplisiter’ we should see ourselves as presented with a new intellectual and practical task: that of developing a critical theory of recognition, one that identifies and defends only those versions of the cultural politics of difference that can be coherently combined with the social politics of equality.
- Nancy Fraser, Justice interruptus: critical reflections on the "postsocialist" condition, page 12
This issue of ‘Up Close and Personal’ takes up the life and work of contemporary artist Riyas Komu, who consciously keeps alive certain political tracts only to put them onto a debatable space while producing witnesses of a discreet geo-political life conceived and brought well into the domains of art gallery practices. Komu allows for certain overlapping of politically treated, messed up and exploited human contexts. These are brought into much unlikely spaces of art gallery and artist’s studio, thereby spreading disquiet that is similar to the one felt in contemporary life. In an art gallery space that is thus inevitably transformed, Komu does not make real machineries of any abstruse political thinking. He gathers himself as an energetic source for creative contestations, conceptualising and joining materials and people, otherwise found at disparate contexts.
Post-Independent Indian art had well envisaged an artist as somebody who takes up issues of the self in public in various frameworks of identities. The undercurrents of civic life, religion, class and gender, intellectually articulated within these frameworks were variously accentuated by the artist’s partisan practices reflecting ‘places of people.’ Now it is important to see that politics is no more about fixed ‘self’ and ‘the other’ endlessly debating within a priori framework. Of late, in contemporary art this discursive space is apparently displaced discontinued and to some extent replaced by an elusive art-context where a new breed of ‘art work force’ is trusted upon. In the last decade, art’s inevitable emergence in India as a productive self-referential canon was more or less established beyond the purview of politics-discourses and fixed sense of artist’s ‘intrinsic belongingness.’ So, one often needs to locate ‘the political’ in art today, in some prudent models of trans-national practices wherein sometimes informed political layers are almost blurred beyond recognition. That makes politically concerned art as an expression of evanescent global public domain where inter-related identities of people, including that of artists, veer between recognition and anonymity. The art gallery also in fact forms a circumspect public domain for individuals to present a lived reality. This space quite often discourages the direct references to political self, hence that emerges as metaphors that can swiftly turn visual absolutes on some wistful equivocations and bizarre techniques of presentation.
In such a context, Komu’s Studio/ project space designed in the gallery looks like a striking domain in itself, newly forged as a work place of artists, carpenters, football players, journalists and the like, all with certain productivity that they can mutually share. This is one among a few commendable ‘intellectual and practical tasks’ broadening art’s public domain today by a fresh mechanism of thinking, conceiving, clarifying and engaging with many civilian contexts that are carrying ambiguous identity markers and scattering across global cultures.
1
Resources, threads and vision of an inherited political balcony
At the fag end of fast-paced globalisation, Indian art is an expanding canon while many Asian and
The cultural and economic dead ends only necessitate fresh critical methods of locating claiming and registering the facets of people’s visibilities and experiences. That really puts one in a search for reliable continuous resources while responding to (rather than appropriating from outside realms) habitual imaginations and hypothetical ideologies (of both religion and civic life).
In late 90s Komu emerged as an artist directly critiquing the ideological frameworks of religion and politics. Often he is doing this by presenting their symbolisms in a disquieting space constructed in the gallery. The ideational resources also seem to be working around the representation of life-studies caught in a symbolic scheme of life and death. All these are always addressed in relation to some specific social contexts projecting complete inability of contemporary life to fathom out any logic to contain a large share of ‘systematic citizens.’ He has always taken this in a very personal way as an artist with skills in portraiture, composition, in devising modes to jell with people and to reference art historical resources. In recent works Komu has started addressing it almost autobiographically.
“I was intimately connected with my father M.M.Komu because of a realisation he could offer me through a certain lifestyle. In the context of Kerala he could be noted perhaps as a ‘Gandhian Communist.’ This left reflections in my childhood not simply because I lived in a family where politics is a strong feeling. My father’s life was actually as example of atmost personal activism that was sometimes against the flow of discriminatory political activism at that time. He used to run a match box factory where more than hundred people worked. He was the secretary of the association of match box factories in our region. He also used to take part in many local labour struggles including that of toddy workers and that resulted in his ‘expultion’ from his family at some point. But he was very close to the people in the locality and those working in the factory in a very family way. He had a commendable and respectable human(ist) resource. Because his factory was located in a Christian locality and opposite to one of the biggest churches, it gave me a particular experience for my childhood. It was all about mixing up with people. Rubber wood came in bullock-carts. It got peeled and dried. The whole process of wood is part of my childhood. My father used very modern equipments for a match factory then. There was a machine that could even sense and sort the quality of matchsticks. The matchsticks alone were exported to Shivakashi. Curiously my association with wood starts from there, not through carpentry as one might assume today. But there were my friends, sons of carpenters and traditional carvers, who studied with me and they exhibited great talent in drawing.”
One can imagine a local village ambience in central Kerala, home to this artist. People must have kept on coming and going. They must have converged at a (political or ideological) father’s veranda for many kinds of exchanges like delivering labour or reading newspaper or seeking financial assistance or joining ceremonies or celebrating local festivities of religious centres and the like. People also must have diverged from such groups, either for life or for death (martyrdoms, casualties and many such varieties of logics that death offers to human beings). In whatever ways, death / anonymity create a contingent situation.
As much as life, death demands reason. More so, the anonymity, the death in life, actually presses the whole problematic of representation. The ‘father’ himself looks like an anonymous figure except for the affectionate importance he gained in a locality and in a group of political party workers at a time. He is a ‘systematic citizen’ with his liabilities in family, regularly listening to musical traditions of Tamil Sufis, reading Quran mostly in the ways and means of his mother tongue, gathering a public domain on an everyday basis in ways that are largely undocumented and under-expressed. But Komu, the artist-son picked up the thread and kept on designing projects that register the domains of systematic citizens. In childhood he was the favoured scribe for this father to write articles that comment on politics.
“He was sensitive to political parties who change strategies and even themselves for survival when a party gets power. But he had a strange faith in the potential human content in people and he addressed it in articles at crucial points of political takeovers, locally and nationally. Later I used to write letters to him when I came to Bombay for studying art. It used to be a communication about life in Bombay. I was then more interested in textile designing and advertising. But the riots in Bombay (1992) and the whole life as its aftermath there made me sensitive to the politics seen around. That influence continued in my work. Though father was not exactly aware of what happens in art world, the letters he exchanged with me kept throwing perspectives on the substance of living and questions like what is the role of political art, what can art do in a person’s life etc. In fact he tried out all possible trades to survive, be it producing and selling matchbox or washing powder. He went to school only till the fourth standard but he spoke English well and even wrote articles in Malayalam. Even as a religious practitioner he had a political choice of language that works the most in his own context.
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Systematic citizens
The genre of portraiture that Komu relies on from the early stages of his practice involved calculated choices of images and quite clear pictorial notations evinced by titles, compositions and flat painterly mannerisms tempered with a high key of personal relationship. Layers of life-studies exploring subject-object relationships are pertinent but more precisely they are statements on culture specific citizen-representation in a ‘globalising’ public domain. Media imageries of people in both distant war-struck regions and the immediate present of his metropolitan Bombay compete in presenting amplified but disinterested language of informative-story-presentation. In spite of a surge for media-realism in Indian art, what one could politically do with those images in an art language was in fact addressed rarely in Indian scenario. A few artists like Jitish Kallat, Atul Dodiya, T.V Santhosh and Shibu Natesan started effectively addressing it in their own personal ways at late 1990s.
Photo-portraits in media directly speak the language of political system that keep record, notice, punish or identify the faces of people in a systematic manner. But some of their movements by chance blur them or smudge them. Those are but artistic filters. The changed or skewed angles or pasted texts or signs in the language of photo-portraits of people actually create strong uneasiness, many disturbing meanings being added into the order and information provided in the media context. And Komu created exactly that in his first major show ‘Unconditional’ in Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai (2002). He partly gathered proverbial narratives from Brueghel. (works like ‘Rice Soup,’ ‘Love Making,’ ‘Don’t count them before they hatch,’ ‘Oxygen an illusion’). The paintings carried very expressive life-sketches of children, women and men caught in working on something or hatching or producing things only to be spoiled by polished marks and pictures, layered on from another order. In this show he had arrived at many seminal aspects that started determining his concerns afterwards. ‘Elysian Series’ (charred wood, automotive paint and metal were used) carried his concerns of death and anonymity in a political society. The charred face of a man gets stuck at unruly pipes that carried something related to either his life or death. Also in that show there was a wood-metal-enamel work titled ‘Bethlehem – Tragedy of a Carpenter’s Son.’ The metal block is, in other words, a hollowed-out star. It is topped and shadowed by a wood block that has a cross’s hollow space. The whole form together again makes a larger shadow. There is a poignant poetry of ‘loss of matter.’
One gets struck with the haunting presence of religious and ideological symbols of polity with which any viewer would have some associations or the other. It beats up the molten thing within individuals, the collective citizen-experience, be it in democracies, religious polity or oppressive states in the world.
So immediately there arise anxious queries as to what political stance this artist is expressing through particular religious and ideological symbols. Suddenly the artist’s own affiliations are fingered upon, the situation which normally artists in the era of globalisation try to simply evade.
“I should relate the whole question of spirituality and ideology to the show which I called ‘Faith Accompli’ (2006). In that show what I tried to emphasis was my cultural background. ‘My Father’s Balcony’ was another major work that was but added only in the second stage of that show. There was a particular reason for that. When I did the show in Delhi the ‘Father’s Balcony’ was not there. Show brought in several arguments like why do you intensely use different kind of religious symbolisms in your work to address contemporary anarchy in the system. That is when I decided to address the whole issue in a much more personal level. That is why I called it ‘My Father’s Balcony.’ This show covered almost all kind of religious beliefs which I have personally experienced in my early years. The school where I studied and the teenage friendships, cultural activities and ambience there really had bigger impact on me. It was not painting but more of other traditional art forms in local festivals that counted in my life at that time. They were more than religious events. The village Peruvanam itself has a rich history of multiple lifestyle practices, religion being only one part of it, in all of which we felt our share of intense participation. My house was on the way through which every year Lord Sri Rama ceremoniously passed by during the season of festival in the temple. Music, rhythms and immense sharing of energies were inevitable parts of that experience too, this is something I summarized in ‘My Father’s Balcony.’ ”
Komu recounts these perhaps casually over this conversation. But I am reading them as graffiti in the hinder world of wood blocks used in his ‘Father’s Balcony.’ A view OF the balcony and a view FROM the balcony are different. Here again, the awareness of a balcony is built almost in a monumental language of lament. The balcony/veranda had once created space for quiet thoughtfulness and participation of a life at the verge of inner and outer spectrums in the father’s world. Or is it more than a lament, a thoroughly constructed and investigated monument designed by the son to address his world’s complexities, the world order that created a lot of symbolisms and dumped it in tombs, temples and constitutions, and people started nailing him for his assumed use of direct symbols?
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‘Komu Studio’: A circuit of different sons
‘I feel unhappy when living wood smells like dead plastic. World becomes a stinking dark skull of the arrogance that has lost its memory about location’
- From the artist statement written for the show ‘Other’ AICON Gallery London
The structures in iron and wood make discreet spiritual states in Komu’s practice. Forms in iron painted in brilliant red with a hollow space within which a white house or black pot is inserted, evoke peculiar spirituality of private domains. Those forms also instill uniform entities in a consumerist world that keep cooking blood red series (William Baars Project -2007). On the other hand, the medium of wood addresses another kind of uniform spiritual states that hark back to inheritances of civilisations. The cart-structures giving a moving snake’s feel, built with amazing carpentry skills implant man’s continuous domesticity. But that has turned into an absurd carrier of fears beliefs and desires, casting shadows of many abstract shapes on the gallery’s wall. (‘Story Planter,’ Gallery Espace, 2007) Be it any medium, the tension of different world orders is culled out to form structures of curious harmony. The cart’s wheels carrying ego brains and supporting small pillars of the Story Planter that look like the minarets, the component in Islamic architecture, do not go unnoticed.
The teenage Komu had seen many processions and he happily recounts them in this conversation, just like an amused story teller. He also has seen many civilian demonstrations leaving impacts by various floating tableaus, spirited dances and speeches addressing crowds. The whole show of life in public domain and its seasonal extravaganzas were also found in Bombay, the city he chose to live and work, perhaps in more intensified and apocalyptical scale.
“My father’s spirituality reflected in the importance he gave to health and ceremonious lifestyle. It was always concerned with some power. We all feel it too. You don’t have to be religiously engaged with your work, but you can be intensely engaged with your work because of your political interest. But the work starts guiding you. Work starts giving you elements. Intuitive elements enter in our work when there reaches a depth of engagement.”
Being a Son/King out of a peculiar sanction is the basic premise in ancient civilisations. It also involves a sense of carrying forward one’s goal that is life. Then what can be the tragedy of a carpenter’s son? The good luck message goes that he has to build vehicles subdued by the ‘immaculate one’ (Allah) lest he wouldn’t have embarked upon that vehicle.(‘Tragedy of A Carpenter’s Son,’ 2006) Nobody can overlook those carpenters in ‘Komu Studio’ who worked with the artist in building strange ‘vehicles’ of artistic thinking. What they chiselled, slit and partially hollowed out was their own vehicle in collaboration. And Komu employs them and gels with them in return perhaps much in his father’s vein.
Komu’s studio looks like a workshop of different sons, here again systematic citizens are mutually vending skills passions and thoughts. Doing with the concept and materials like paint, iron, wood or whatever, is then a matter of artistic ceremony and a continuous lifestyle even at the face of extinction of everybody. It is again perhaps no place for rhetorical harmony and equal status. People, be it artist or carpenters or labourers, they enter with their spectrums and work ‘on demands’ of situations. Even the artist works on some demands to excel, to bring something new, to produce shows before he is forgotten. The carpenters have to respond to artist’s demands or even to the limits and possibilities of the medium in relation to the dreams shared by the artist. It is a circuit of different sons.
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Life in a geo-political map
For fairly long time, modern Indian Art had been sensitising its cultural identity as a post-colonial nation. So there are 20th century art iconographies in India of people, gods, popular culture, photo culture, film culture etc. Large share of Indian art during fast-paced globalising times thrived on mutations of this post-colonial identity. But this art context is yet to take up the civilisation-discourses in relation to India, especially the geo-political and socio-economic vividness of the Middle-East region and the peculiar connectivity that different Indian regional cultures have been establishing with it. Riyas Komu brings the question of multiple layers in people’s life in ‘Islamic regions’ looked upon often as ‘civilisational other’ side of much that is modern and progressive while the very civilisational beginnings and basic attempts at modernisation of religious life do exist well in Islam. The kind of eye that Komu develops for this ‘civilisation question’ is not restricted to Islam as a religion or even as a way of life. He projects it as part of a number of marginalia and the problem state of affairs in each disturbed culture-pockets scattered and layered within differently politicised nationalities in the world. It becomes a larger question than the earlier cultural imperialisms because the moment one gets into some particular regions of the world today, one is initiated into a framework of ‘global’ engagement in everything but with messy perceptions.
There arises the need for addressing it in scales focused on particular region’s or culture’s or identity’s size. Often what is messed up with is the cultic nature acquired by histories memories and lifestyles of different cultures and nationalities in relation to their specific natural resources, cultural imaginations and much-layered economy. This is something that Komu meticulously brings in as an (Indian) artist to his own context, as much as it is an issue of an emerging geo-political alignment of international art practice.
“I was in Karachi for a month on a residency. One day I was with a Chinese photographer who was also in the residency. We went to a big cemetery abandoned inside the city. One side were slums and on other side were the city structure, the national highway. Then we realised it is a post second world war cemetery. People buried were British Generals and Soldiers. I was reflecting upon my experience in Karachi through these photographs. I felt which you feel today more aggressively, that the state of that country is almost bizarre. What I saw there and what I took from there, I didn’t actually show there. I showed another work there, titled ‘Mubarak Mubarak.’ I shot the Karachi Series photographs with black and white film, ten to twelve rolls I had taken there. It was like capturing contemporary Pakistan almost becoming like a Kabaristan. I could experience such a kind of threatening life there. Also I talked to people and artists and they always said that the country is in a mess. Crematorium is both a fascination and a reality in my work. It was there from the 2002 Elysian Series… I am actually repenting upon somebody who died without any reason, the idea of somebody becoming a martyr. That work was done in the context of the Gujarat issue. After coming to Bombay, I met with this as a continuous issue. Thousands of people are getting killed. They are somebody who lost their life but there is no one to address them. Nothing gets registered, their death is in vain.”
Komu apparently raises the issue of archiving and documenting things not for inherent reality checks or to design an absolute monumentality for his subject matter but for political reasons of an artist who travels through real terrains with his trained image-making skills, listening skills in music, engaging in sports and interacting with people on some shared platform of productivity. So art work turns much as an experimenting platform for certain convictions that need a familiar language to address huge lot of unaccounted expressions, participations and even vanishing of people. In a world where war penetrates into messed up cultures anywhere anytime, somebody gets killed either for being an ‘other race’ or goes and gets killed oneself to become a martyr. That is a religious and/or political way of death. In life and art, somebody often gets represented for belonging to a (‘exotic other’) region or one goes and presents oneself in the more legitimised ‘other scheme’ with painstaking appropriations. One can say, that is a practical way of doing/dying with art. However, all these situations are arising from some abstract reasons largely pertinent in reality.
Komu’s symbolisms (be it sheer stink of automotive paint used or the blown up physicality of people or uncanny presence of prudent wood objects in the gallery) also carry an abstract political idea that always heats up a demand for immediate clarity. And he of course delivers clarity as much as a language of witnesses can deliver in art at all.
“Abstractness is a picture of an idea that religion practically and methodically uses. There is an idea of somebody being a jihadi. There is somebody weighing the mafia with political reason. And to find the political reasons, there is used a definite and real structure. There is a stage when penetrating an idea that ‘You die for the god.’ Karachi Series is the landscape of that idea.”
Komu does not mimic or parody reality in photo works or paintings based on media/film imagery. In his object-works there are materials inserted, pasted or monumentalised only to accentuate specific ironies. For example, in an ongoing work in his studio, one finds the strenuous task of moulding kufic calligraphic texts into the woodcarving’s splendour. In totality what is being made looks like a huge (oil) pipe. The reference of oil economy of the Middle East is pertinent but it figures in Komu’s projects as part of an evolving personal art-context. Rather, they are an artist’s haunting witnesses to nationalities and territories jeopardised by contradicting civilisation-inheritances and domestic traditions that virtually turn them out like ‘Take Away’ chicks (one can remember the work Komu showed in India Art Summit). Interestingly everywhere, Komu takes the perspective of civilians in any context, never really registered, infinitely evolving entities of suffering and ‘demonstrating’ themselves.
I have always been inspired by the idea of martyrdom and the martyr as a metaphor to propagate a campaign. It is not a new thing. Histories, artistic activities, literature and music of many civilisations are replete with examples of that. In ‘Last Pass’ the martyr gets his due: the last rite (or right) by participating in a protest march. This work also structures a static device that condenses a moment, a movement, or a march into a sculpture. I enjoyed the idea of a street with thousands of people following a hearse to declare their solidarity. As you see in this work, it suggests the current turmoil around the shoulders of the civilians — the bearers of a burden.
- Artist note for the show ‘Last Pass.’
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The poetics of MARKING
She is the dream that scatters with the sun, Absorbed into flame and flame absorbing, Eternal motion, one with endless peace, The camel has no was or will be, only being.
-From the Spirit of the Sand, a Nabati poem (Nabati speaks the language of the common people) as quoted by Riyas Komu in the artist note for the project ‘Camel Cliche’
The woodblocks reminding us of the ancient structures of civilisation as in ‘Father’s Balcony,’ the concrete that contains the graffiti of Iraqi soccer captain in ‘Left Leg,’ or the kufic calligraphy that is grafted onto the difficult woodcraft in the current project getting done in Komu Studio, all bear very intrinsic civilisation-references that instill an integrated poetic element.
What strikes in this poetics is the presence of an object and its context that can together relate multiple territories in the thread of a shared anxiety. For example the presence of a water pump in the show ‘Safe to Light’ ( Azad Art Gallery, Tehran) at once refer to Komu’s childhood village memories of strained access to water and the other politicised contexts of natural resources (water and oil) in a larger spectrum, including the Middle East where this very art show is presented. Interestingly there is another sub-text of ‘self’ that Komu brings through such striking shows that he manages to work out in such a place like Teheran (relatively insignificant place in an art-geography) located in one of the ‘disturbed/disturbing regions’ of the world. Komu of course has exhibited at some major centres of world art. But his recent shows and the recent focus of practice include the art contexts of some newly accounted regions in the art world map’s not so legibly marked areas. Moreover there is a concerted attempt to produce ‘documents’ in many other forms of collaborations, like the journals done with friend and fellow traveller Ullekh, sent from World Cup Football at South Africa that got published in major Indian dailies in early July, 2010.
It is interesting to look at the poetics of MARKING that this artist develops over and again. “Mark him” is something one shouts to a defender: it means to track your opponent’s movements, to limit them. “To mark is to anticipate where your player wants to go and contain him” thus writes Jennifer Doyle in ART 21 blog discussing Komu’s focus gathered on athletes and artists since show ‘Mark Him’ in 2007. That has a larger take on his earlier projects too. In ‘Systematic Citizens,’ it was more painterly reproduction, a painter’s variance from a mediatic televisual eye for facts and pictures of international politics. Still since the MARK HIM series (2007) Komu develops a new space, gathering many sub-texts of physical conditions of work, ambitions, pleasures and the self that gets politically under-represented by these very televisual eyes.
Iraq’s victory over Saudi Arabia in the 2007 Asia Cup final is likely to hold up as one the decade’s most significant wins. The team’s victory represented a complex distillation of resistance and anger. The torture and murder of Iraqi athletes is frequently cited in the litany of horrors suffered by the Iraqi people at the hands of Saddam Hussein. Responding to allegations of torture in the country’s soccer program, in 1997, FIFA investigated the architect of Iraq’s athletics program, Uday Hussein, but spoke only with his people and wrote a report exonerating the sadist. Interest in the plight of the country’s people has long been guided by questions of political expediency. These athletes know intimately what it is to have one’s body enlisted in the service of the state, and are wary at best about having their experiences drafted into discourse defending the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. On winning the cup, while a frantic official stood next to him shouting, “No Politics! No Politics,” captain Younis Mahmoud said, simply: “I want America out of Iraq now!”
-Jennifer Doyle, ART 21 blog
Precisely, football is the sport that gained life and momentum mainly in the countries with huge political unrest, the African Latin American and partially the Middle East nations. Riyas brings this sport into contemporary art’s context. In variously designed shows he tries to monumentalise (‘Left Leg’), blow up (faces of players photographed) and conceptualise it as a structural question of space (‘Subrato to Cesar,’ Gallery Maskara). Further, recently Komu travelling sometimes with his journalist / artist friends who share his concerns at their certain levels took up the role of a distinctive reportage maker from no orders of establishments but from the premises as an artist.
The art context that Komu creates out of the particular sport of football is actually capable of generating its own subtexts, in turn gathering markers of a careful politicising of the very domain called contemporary art. Komu belongs to an exemplary artist-generation calibrated with a passion for productivity. Komu’s almost infatuated taste for stressful scale of work reflects it well. At the same time, the conditions in which artist’s passion for working in extensive and monumental scales always offer struggles and demands for conviction.
On one hand, the sport here becomes a metaphoric entity for all that is brutally neglected and exploited for anything, from sheer profits to wars of nationalities. Yet for many reasons of passion, it is being lived and chased as significant taste. At the same time, football in Komu’s projects is treated not much as metaphor but as a real condition across the world wherein people, the so called ‘fans’ almost categorically “field” chosen players and nations to play and gain glory for no predisposed reasons other than what the sport and the act of watching the sport offer them, a sort of carnivalesque pleasure. Like in art, even failures in the sport cause a reason to certain grace. Passion in the game is beyond the immediately available official records. Thus goes an excerpt from Komu’s and Ullekh N P’s World Cup journals:
It wasn’t a World Cup to remember for Didier Drogba, the continent’s biggest footballing star. First he got injured and then his team Ivory Coast, who were in Group of Death alongside Brazil and Portugal, failed to advance. He may not have scored against Korea DPR in their last World Cup match but was instrumental in his team winning 3-1. He later thanked the emotional crowd by giving away whatever he wore at the match — except his shorts — including his boots. And yet, the 32-year-old Droga walked away with grace.
-Rainbow Nations: Different Strokes, 4th July, 2010
The artist personally engages with footballers, fans, memories, records and histories of Soccer available from various vantage points. But his artist perspective is basically of the one among the crowd watching the scenario reporting many texts of some passing significance. As created out of an artist’s journey, his collaborative journals from World Cup Football, 2010 acquire a disquieting significance for the political observations they contain as in his art works.
A sense of shared collaboration emerges in the vein of something he had already developed with the carpenter friends in the studio. What comes out is not simply the inside stories of brutally treated players and international contestations for particular national identities but a latent eye for macabre details that an artist alone can shape. In his ‘Left Legs’ project dedicated to Younus Mahmoud, captain of the Iraqi soccer team, the work called ‘ Football Sculptures’ is inevitably a personal take on the very physicality of the sport. On one hand, the muscled leg evokes certain fall out admiration for the energies and orgies that this sport offers. On the other, the schematic woodcarving actually presents a bolted condition. The whole admiration is bolted in concrete debris that failed to catch with some kind of built edict.
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Artist as discreet witness
Rather than as a creator of art objects carrying definite (metaphoric) presence of something else, Komu functions in contemporary art as a creative force in correlating various elements. His project is often a process, acknowledging the very labour invested in it as an acquired social context. So they are always designed in a deeply thoughtful realm, often intuitive and philosophical attempts pulling threads from continuous imaginations in our collective unconscious of life, passions and death. It is ‘intuitive’ because of the repeated investment of a shared unconscious. In the case of Komu, it seems this unconscious is a terrain of fears and anxieties of losing a productive and justful public domain. All the people-oriented projects of this artist are gathered around the angst-ridden humanity that still goes on to produce inherited splendours of life and death, whatever marks them in history. One rather needs to live in and out of those realms that an ‘artistic attitude’ alone offers. Artist needs to take pains to register each relative situation in the infinite possibilities of mediums and materials found suitable. So those apparent symbolisms used by Komu are arbitrary artist-utilities than deceptively direct references from a familiar sign system.
However, one acts politically at traumatic junctures. There is a looming darkness of boredom, a lack of legitimacy, an exerted indifference towards life and qualities of humanity. Perhaps today it is caused more by extreme forms of boredom in the programmed mutations of infinite binaries, the zeros and ones. Earlier boredom was caused by fixities creating frameworks that actually couldn’t let one move out of them, the world of mirrors, analogies, the self and the other. These extreme conditions but co-exist today creating as much civilisational complexities as possible.
Politics in art today gets activated by drilling holes into such complexities. One can start travelling through the resultant vacuums in individual imaginations and social engagements and come out as discreet witnesses. This is the possibility that Riyas Komu’s art engagements have opened.
A counter-political possibility in art is explored when all that is civilisational, religious and ideological turn out as political engines for people and geographies to death and anonymity. ideological turn out as political engines for people and geographies to death and anonymity.
(Dr. Kavitha Balakrishnan is a poet, curator and bi-lingual writer on contemporary Indian art. She holds an M.A. (Fine) Art History from M.S.University,
