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An artistic encounter with memories, loss and pain...

Madhur Tankha

Exhibition of Veer Munshi's paintings opens in the Capital

ART THAT SPEAKS: A painting by Veer Munshi

NEW DELHI: A weeklong solo exhibition of paintings and installations titled "Encounter" by Veer Munshi opened at Visual Arts Gallery here at Lodhi Road on Friday.

Hosted by Art Alive Gallery in collaboration with India Habitat Centre, the exhibition features both paintings and installations, articulating Munshi's own experience of leaving his home State to seek fresh pastures elsewhere.

In January 1990, Munshi was compelled to leave Srinagar. Although he settled down in Delhi, the artist in him has in some sense not left his home State of Jammu and Kashmir.

Going beyond the politics of Kashmir to the human dimensions in terms of the tragedy of the local people leaving their homeland across the globe, Munshi says that his own loss has made him aware of the repercussions of people being forced to leave their homeland across the world.

The artist's installations in wood, metal and papier mache are poignant memories of his own past -- being obsessively concerned with the "shikara". The boat has been upturned so that it represents a coffin, at times blackened, and at other times repeating his own self-portrait.

Evoking an ethereal landscape of lake and mountains through his canvas, Munshi confronts discerning art lovers with two figures -- one of the "common man", naked and vulnerable, and next to him a militiaman in camouflaged uniform. Standing beside each other and looking back towards the mountains, together they represent the conflicts, the violation of human rights and of denying people their freedom.

The artist's essential vocabulary in images includes division, partition and migration. These three words are integrated so that one word-image leads to the next.

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