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Revisiting history through art
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Alexis Kersey's show looks at the globalised world through traditional Indian themes and motifs
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REVIVING COMPANY SCHOOL PAINTINGS One of Kersey's works
Born an Indian, but with western education and perspective, Alexis Kersey attracted to the richness of Indian culture and tradition revisits a particular moment of Indian historical tradition, namely, the Nineteenth Century Company School Paintings in his present series of exhibition titled New Company School Painting at the British Council in association with Apparao Galleries.
In 1990, Kersey took a conscious decision of returning to India and to Mysore, where his family presently resides. Reason — disillusionment with British government policies. The artist's revisitation of the site of Company School Painting (created by professionals, draftsmen and amateurs who were either British or Indian, with the latter working to British models. They expressed different levels of British interests, tastes, feelings and skill. They record British reactions to the Indian scene, throwing light on its social and cultural history) is to underpin the colonisers' gaze. Through this body of works, Kersey gets back to that historical position by redefining `imperialism' manifest within the globalised economy. His hybrid iconography comprises the Indian-American Mohawk combined with forms from Indian art in the nature of yogic representational poses. These are intimately illustrated with imagery of erotic Indian art juxtaposed with English artillery canons, horse riders, foot soldiers and many other significant visual vocabulary appropriated from Company paintings. Kersey is offering an alternative narrative through this revisitation, where his concerns are about the debilitating effects of globalisation and technology on certain Indian traditional pictorial practices. Though not a trained artist, he chose to study and practice art by interacting with hoarding painters in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The question is, why the hoarding artists? Kersey strongly feels that hoarding is a form of art that harbours the rich legacies of Indian pictorial skills.
Intriguing works
Kersey's works intrigues as well arouse the curiosity of the viewer. Intriguing since they are wrapped in mantle of allegories and symbolism, curious in his deployment of iconography and visual language. The works have direct bearings on the viewer's sensibilities because of its strong representational character, enabling spontaneous association with the perceptual world. Kersey reframes and reconceptualises the advertising posters that appear on every conceivable metropolitan space, fascinated as he is by the pastiche of western images with the local. This is the referential beginning for nearly all his works, where he intelligently melds the Indian philosophical, visual, and vernacular content to create his own iconography to drive home the point of the need to maintain the special Indian flavour of its culture and art forms.
Kersey's works are therefore an interesting meld of western aesthetics with Indian themes such as in the Last Supper, Venus Yogi, The Businessman, Married Couple, Remote Control, The Dual, The Mask, among others. Kersey has conceptualised his frames in detail — from the placement of the imagery of a particular kind/type to compositional layout, and then sought the intervention of hoarding artists for its execution. It is therefore not surprising to find elements as the the punky western earrings, the vernacular script common in advertising posters, the black rimmed frames of the glasses etc. His works titillate the senses. His most remarkable work in this exhibition is the Last Supper, ironically titled, containing the traditional religious iconography of 12 disciples and a central female figure replacing the Christ. Each disciple has the food served on a plantain leaf with glass of water and interconnected with tube. The allegory is obvious. Within the globalised world every country is bounded and bonded, the consumerism is implicit in the bar code that appears with vernacular numbers and the cooked food to be replaced by a culture of packaged one of "heat and eat".
The show is on at British Council till September 10.
ASHRAFI S. BHAGAT
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