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Contemporary comment Ved Prakash Gupta, left, with his work, top, and Shiv Verma, with his installation, bottom

Conceptual art, contemporary and striking, thought, radical and decisive, their art has the vigour of youth, exuding an energy that’s fresh, forthcoming and free. For Ved, an IIT aspirant whose hopes were dashed by the policies of the Mandal Commission chose art as the language of his rejected mind. For him art is that which equals and is equal for everybody; art that has no prejudices and recognises merit and not means. He uses the figurative medium to spit out his anger against the injustices heaped on him and others like him.

Coming from a small town in North Bihar, he rebelled against the discriminations that he faced time and again. Small town, backward class, back of beyond Bihar, he was the butt of isolation and nepotism. “I faced discrimination at every stage.” And the villain was the rich and the powerful, be it the politician, industrialist, high by creed or caste. This present exhibition is his anger against this untitled man. Ved gives a fat funny form to this “creamy strata of society.”

And so he cuts them to size and dwarfs them into minnows, suited, booted minnows. “If people come to the gallery and laugh at the funny shapes and form, face and figures, I rejoice. I feel I have been successful in reducing the bade log, to size.” And you laugh at the fat forms in jacket, ties, paunch, their arrogance reduced to a spectacle. Each exhibit is a veritable vomit against the bigwigs. Anger laced with ridicule it is biting satire comparable to Swift in prose and Pope in poetry.

As a contrast Shiv Verma’s works are a gentler comment on the invasive science and technology that’s transforming inherent culture. Hailing from Kondagaon in Madhya Pradesh in Bastar, famous for its tribal craft, Shiv’s works bear clear imprint of ethnic art. The Dogra coil work and the animal figures are right from tribal heartland. And Shiv, who spent his childhood there, is afraid of the loss of culture to the experiments of modern science. “My dream is to translate Bastar art into contemporary modern art for the modern world to understand.” And he does so in the series ‘Skepticism’ commenting on interference from outside be it genetically modified fruits and vegetables, be it cloning sheep, be it globalisation of our villages. Four drawings on canvas portray this thought: scuba diving interferes with natural water, melon insides are tampered with, even space too finds alien interference. Don’t depend on machines they are heartless and can pack up at the most crucial moments, is what he says in the installation of a stapler. The guitar morphing into India is a comment on the fast westernisation of the country, on the loss of its culture. But he is not ready to take sides, like Ved. “I am just commenting. See what is happening to society,” he says ruefully.

So anger and dismay combine at the exhibition of the two young winners ready to take on the world in their inimitable styles with their inimitable art tools and language.

PRIYADERSHINI S.

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