Gallery Espace presents ‘A Cry from the Narrow Between’

New Delhi: Two young artists at the forefront of their respective generations in the contemporary art scenes of India and China explore power, eroticism, passion and violence through their multi-media artworks. While Mumbai-based artist Tejal Shah depicts the fantasies visualized by LGBTQI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning and Intersex) people; Beijing-based artist Han Bing on the other hand explores the boundaries between profane and sacred; eroticizing ordinary, everyday objects—especially tools of manual labour, construction, and sources of sustenance.

Says Renu Modi, Director, Gallery Espace: “Both Tejal Shah and Han Bing through their multi-media artworks which includes photography, video installation, text-based works, sound works and performance art attempt to modernize, urbanize and discipline unruly populations that transgress the dominant social norms.”

TEJAL SHAH

• Three large scale photographic series: The first photograph titled The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne/Burned on the water is about Laxmi, a very well known hijra and human rights activist based in Mumbai who had expressed the wish to become like Cleopatra. The secondphotograph , Southern Siren – Maheshwari is also about a hijra called Maheshwari in Mumbai who expressed a desire to become a South Indian film star and see herself in a song and dance sequence, romancing the hero and to be romanced by him in return. The thirdphotograph You too can touch the moon - Yashoda with Krishna portrays Malini’s desire to be a mother by using Raja Ravi Varma’s painting ‘Yashoda with Krishna’ as a reference point.

• 40 small scale bazaar-framed photos in 5x7, 6x8 and 8x10 size from behind the scenes of the shoots of the above large scale works.

• Sound installation with text based works titled “What are You?” – Moving casually between staged performances, documentary, music video and appropriation, these portraits direct the viewer’s attention to the physicality of several members of the hijra (transgender) community in the red-light district of Mumbai. The film moves into the documentation of one individual’s experience of the gender reassignment process and concludes with slow dancing bodies moving with colorful, neo-op, go-go patterns inviting the viewer to the life embracing vitality of this community. The installation includes four beds, which are based on those found in local brothels arranged barrack style and painted in a distressed mauve finish.

HAN BING

• Live performance on March 12, 2010: Titled Dreams of a Lost Home: Mating Season, No. 12; Han Bing will be joined by local people in this live art performative intervention that will take place in the centre of the market, just outside GalleryEspace . Han Bing questions the idea that the urbanization and "modernization" of society as unproblematic "progress," and reminds us of what is lost or destroyed to make way for the new. Holding chunks of rubble from demolished buildings, between clumps of cotton from quilts, and coils of somber, curling smoke from incense, Han Bing and local participants lie dreaming of their lost homes and estranged ways of life, and the cold, impersonal distances that the modern city and lifestyle has created between people.

• Photographs: The artist will be showing performance photography from his Mating Season (2001) and Love in the Age of Big Construction (2006) series.

• Video: Titled Love in the Age of Big Construction, the artist asks the viewer to consider the rural people (whom we address as dirty, low-class and uncivilized migrant labourers) who without educational opportunities, start-up resources, obscene work hours, unsafe conditions and unreliable pay; use their bodies as an altar upon which they offer the nation its fantasy of urbanized modernity but, the city in return has nothing but contempt for them and their sacrifices. Han Bing’s video thus, is a sort of secular prayer to all those construction workers.