EX-OTICA
Chitra Ganesh, Wai Kit Lam, Mithu Sen, Rashid Rana
The group exhibition Ex-otica aims at analysing the increasing permeability of manners, iconography, and themes of Asian contemporary art to Western aesthetic sense. The works by Chitra Ganesh, Wai Kit Lam, Rashid Rana, and Mithu Sen display the research for an individual and cultural identity, which is able to give value to differences, though maintaining an international artistic language. Photographs, drawings and installations on show express the increasing discontinuous borders between East and West.
Chitra Ganesh was born in 1974 in New Delhi; she lives and works in New York. In 2002, she received the MFA at the Columbia University (New York). Many exhibitions put on show since 1998, including, among the most recent ones: Sub-Contingente, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2006); The Gift: Building a Collection, Queens Museum of Art (2005); East of the Sun and West of the Moon, White Columns, New York (2004), Color Theory, Vitamin, Turin (2004).
Based upon the idea that repression of memory is bound to lead to episodes of social and individual crisis, the artist, perfectly integrated in the United States for several years, shows her ability to give voice to the myths of her own original culture, re-interpreting them together with ancient and modern myths of Western civilization. Comics, poems, movie posters, they all become an inspiration source like the myths of Hindu tradition, with no worry to show the inevitable contrasts characterizing multi-cultural societies. Her pictures often cover entire walls and have an epic character expressing an individual, post-colonial narrative pattern. Especially fascinated by the celebration of sex and violence by the archaic mythologies, she shows in particular its prescriptive aim of representing the punishment for the trespassers. The body is the central element of her work, seen as the place where concerns, tensions and contradictions of history clash against one another and take material form.
Wai Kit Lam was born in 1966 in Hong Kong; she lives and works between Hong Kong and Ferrara (Italy). She graduated at the Goldsmith College in London, and thereafter at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her works have been on show in many personal and group exhibitions in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing. Some of her works are to be found in the collection of the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, and in several private collections in Italy, United Kingdom, United States, Canada, and Australia.
Her works analyse in particular the relationships between identity and representation, making use of the photographic portrait as obsessive research of the Self through a practice heavily influenced by the thought of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). Her works, often designed as diptychs, are marked by the juxtaposition of figurative and abstract elements, self-portraits, mirror portraits, backgrounds and details of the surrounding environment. The images show contrasting emotional attributes, in the attempt to present the gap between the ineffable individual identity and the limits of the representations of the Self, influenced by environment and ideology. Wai Kit Lam’s work goes well beyond the apparent intimate and autobiographic aspects, witnessing the identity that is losing its own unity, its own core, when it recognises itself in the alterity of its external image.
Rashid Rana was born in 1968 in Lahore, Pakistan. Among his recent exhibitions: Beyond the Page, Contemporary Art from Pakistan, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester (2006); Singapore Biennial, Singapore (2006); Art Statement, 37th Art Basel (2006), Basel; Identical View, Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi (2005); 3rd Fukuoka Triennial, Fukuoka Museum of Art (2005), Fukuoka (Japan).
The core of Rashid Rana’s work is the presence and representation of multiple, often contradictory, versions of reality. The artist is inspired by the traditional mosaic technique, which he updated through the use of new digital technologies. The images ‘stolen’ from the scenes of Hollywood films, Internet sites and war photographic reportages, make up larger images – photographic installations often measuring several metres – which highlight a kind of schizophrenic relationship between what is and what appears, contradictions of a country where different ages live together. For example, the portraits of women wearing the burqa are shaped through a hundred of pornographic images. Viewers’ attention is immediately drawn to two forms of woman reification and submission that are only seemingly different; they belong to distant civilizations, which are more and more unified by Internet and migration flows.
Mithu Sen was born in Burdwan, West Bengal; she lives and works in New Delhi. Among her recent exhibitions: It’s Good to be Queen, Bose Pacia Gallery, New York (2006); Drawing Room, British Council, New Delhi, and Chemould Gallery, Mumbai (2006); Metrospective: Visual Representations of Metrosexuality, Kitab Mahal, Mumbai (2005).
In this set of works on paper, the artist recovers the atmosphere of the so-called withdrawing room, where women used to retire and discuss in privacy, and deals with the theme of alienation of woman’s body in the Indian society, where women’s sexuality is often marked by feelings of suffering and embarrassment.
Mithu Sen’s drawings recall popular illustrations, and have the same initiatory nature as tales, before those were ‘purged’ from their violent and perturbing elements.
The artist is able to evoke that area of sensual experiences concealed behind society-imposed restrictions, thanks to his style characterised by a non-linear narration and by the playful – though never end to itself - use of free associations.
The conceptual ghetto, which is often social as well, of the different ways of expressing sexuality creates a dissociation between its cultural meaning and its original biological and instinctual meanings.
Mithu Sen’s work does not only call into question the choice of defending a supposed ‘cultural identity’, but rather leads us to think over concepts like culture and civilization, that anyway seem to have an alienating component, as they are limited and limiting expressions of our interior self.
The skilful balance between assimilation and cultural ‘export’ characterizing the works on show is indicative of a true ‘Cusanian revolution’ in contemporary art market: the traditional New York-London axis is being replaced not only by other centres of equal importance, like New Delhi and Beijing, but also by a new art able to find its centre everywhere, because of its international vocation. The new orientalism? Not only ex-otic, but also eccentric.
Luca Vona
EX-OTICA
Opening: November 8, 6 pm
November 9 – January 13 2006
VITAMIN ARTE CONTEMPORANEA
Cortile dei Ciliegi Via Vittorio Andreis 18/10 10152 TORINO ITALY Ph./Fax +39 011 4338836 www.vitaminart.it info@vitaminart.it
