One installation at Sudarshan Shetty’s new solo exhibition One Life Many shows two similar-looking birds perched on two branches. On the floor just below the birds lie similar dishevelled jackets and, on the other side, two lit chandeliers. When a friend of Shetty’s asked him what is the story behind it, the conceptual artist made up one on the spot, saying that they are mechanical birds that come and sit on the trees to lay their droppings on the dishevelled jackets. Their weight uproots the trees revealing chandelier-like roots. “A lot of stories can be idiosyncratic. Your imagination can take flight and have no connection with the real, but it might reflect on our lives in some ways. That is what interests me,” he says.
This installation—at Mumbai-based IF.BE—was just one in the exhibition which consisted of three components: a film that re-stages a well-known myth from medieval India, a theatre of objects with stories to unravel (such as the bird installation) and a museum-like space where tangible forms of media as well as mundane domestic objects are juxtaposed to make us question what is real and what is illusory.
The core philosophy of the immersive showcase comes from a folk tale that the 62-year-old Mumbai-based artist had heard long back and that stayed with him. The story is about a man who takes a dip into a pool only to come out as a woman; circumstances later lead the woman to take a dip in the pool only to transform into the original man. “There is a play of time here and also, the idea of an open-ended story that is open to different interpretations. Can you be multiple within yourself? There is a possibility of being the other or the others within the self and if that is so, what is the true self? What is real and what is not?” he asks.
Indeed, these are the questions that the artist has tried to explore and find answers to for as long as he can recall. Over the years, Shetty, an alumnus of the Sir JJ School of Art, has drawn viewers with his installations and assemblages of mundane objects imbued with symbolical meanings. Themes such as the idea of the self, repetition, memory and time have often found a place in his oeuvre.
Recalling one of his earliest solo exhibitions Paper Moon (1995) which was held at the Pundole Art Gallery and Framasji Cawasjee Hall, Mumbai and at Ravindra Bhavan, Delhi, Shetty recalls that he had made a suit of objects that were on the verge of collapse. “It may look deceptively beautiful but it also collapses under the weight of its own grandeur. So here again, we are playing with opposites,” he shares. Similar ideas have stayed with him over the past three decades and while he was not fully aware of it then, when he looks back now, the artist says that these ideas have remained as a leitmotif for a lot of his work.
works in reclaimed wood, bronze, fibreglass, marble dust and polyester resin
Growing up in a family where there was a lot of music and storytelling courtesy his father who was a Yakshagana (a traditional form of theatre practiced mostly in Southern Karnataka) artist, it was natural for a young boy to get influenced by his father’s craft. After his father passed away, the artist found many of his father’s recordings of his performances. “In one of them, he played the monkey king Bali who is battling his brother Sugreev when Ram’s arrow strikes him in the back.
He tells Ram that he is willing to die but on the condition that he can become one with Ram. Now that is a hair-raising idea for me. Can Bali see Ram’s divinity, and so, wants to be one with the divine. These ideas of multiplicity and the self are of great interest to me and I keep going back to them,” he elaborates.
For the artist, there is no dichotomy in imbuing meaning to mundane objects and then also delve into the futility of those meanings as they can change or adapt. “There is an idea that every moment you live is also every moment that you die, so it is all-inclusive in that same moment. It is not dichotomous. These ideas need to be explored more,” he states, adding that there is nothing absolute, after all.
“I read a quote recently by philosopher Bertrand Russel that sums up my life mantra: ‘I do not want to die for what I believe in because I might be proven wrong’,” he shares with a smile.