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THE ARTS:
EXPO 2000
The
Rhetoric of Contrast
Africa,
Latin America and Asia are the focus areas. After all they have sustained
mankind and civilisations from the dawn of history. Today the "developed
world" offers to them the hope of "sustainable development".
It is another matter that the developed world consumes 70 per cent of
global water and energy resources or that America alone flushes more paper
down its toilets than all of Asia's children use in their schools!
It is this
rhetoric of contrast that marks Rajeev Sethi's "Basic Needs"
pavilion from the rest. While most other scenographers have gone berserk
with video, computer screens, laser and other hi-tech effects to simulate
the perceived future, Sethi, by his outright rejection of these, provides
a completely different stimulus to those who walk into his apparently
sloppy and haphazard 7,000 sq m pavilion spread over three levels and
divided into seven segments.
Invited
by German President Johannes Rau, Sethi involved more than 500 artists
and crafts people from around the world to make a delightfully tongue-in-cheek
visual argument out of Gandhiji's simple one-liner: "There is enough
on this earth to meet every man's need, but not enough to meet even one
man's greed."
Passing
through an entrance lined with a huge tapestry of quilted cloth pieces
made by mothers and children from over 40 countries, the exhibit opens
with a section titled "Hi Life".This installation by the British
artist Graham Rawle is a supermarket shopfloor of every consumerist excess
in an "imagined kingdom of indulgence". As Sethi walks you through
this area he talks about the "shrinking of our senses, the chattering
of our mind, the cluttering of our space-both internal and external".
From there
to the penultimate section, the "Universe Within", he tackles
the entire gamut of human experience through a series of loosely connected
poetic discourses, moving life stories, and of a sensuous celebration
of sheer plastic imagery. Then comes a section which is quite quixotic
in its display of Richard Gere's photographs of Tibet, a message from
the Dalai Lama and the rather disturbing political works by subtly dissenting
Chinese artists-Gao Bo, Song Dong and Yeng Shao Bin-on the concept of
freedom as a basic need. No review of the pavilion would be complete without
mentioning the most animated and satiric epilogue, "The Circus of
Needs", a massive puppet theatre show put up every day by Peter Schumann's
seminal Bread and Puppet Theatre.
As human
narratives go, Sethi's is easily the most touching pavilion at the Expo.
As one leaves the exit, he is surrounded by viewers wanting to linger
on to talk to him-and some of the responses are pretty emotional.
It seems
this orchestrator of stimuli has touched some basic chords.
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Relics
of old empires exist everywhere. Why can't the Mani Shankar Aiyars of
India let them be? asks INDIA TODAY Senior Editor Ravi Shankar in
