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METROSCAPE
The
Itch For Kitsch
It's the fag end
of the arty season and finally, a hit show has come to town. When "Kitsch
Kitsch Hota Hai" (or KKHH if you want to be trendy) opened to an
overflowing house at Delhi's India Habitat Centre last week (on till March
25), people didn't quite know what to expect. As it turned out, they were
more than satiated-In more than one sense. Here, the sensuous and the
sublime couple in a vicarious and voluptuous abandon. Here too, the classy
and the highbrow stoop to touch the garish and the ubiquitous in a self-conscious
act but then get carried away and dissolve into the passionate embrace
of an illicit rendezvous.
 For
curator Madhu Jain, former editor with India Today, the exhibition was
about giving body to a piece of past journalese. "Last February,
when I wrote an article in india today on the subject with the same title,
Renu Modi, director, Gallery Espace, called me to ask if I would do an
exhibition on the theme," she says.
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Top
of the pop: (Clockwise from above) A cut out by Khakhar; theatre activists
Shumitadidi and Zoya do a dance intervention; works by Manish Arora;
curator Madhu Jain (standing) with Anjolie Ela Menon and Aruna Vasudev |
The project took a year to germ-innate. Inputs
from friends-Rupika Chawla, Renu Modi, Gayatri Sinha, Ram Rehman, Peter
Nagy, Patricia Uberoi-and academic sources, helped and have been acknowledged.
Especially the last two, as "Uberoi's long and deep involvement with
the subject and her collection of calendar art gave me the thread which
binds the show together," says Jain. And Nagy, "has been brilliant
with the visualisation of the display". kkhh features the works of
19 contemporary artists in a range of media, from the dada of the genre,
Bhupen Khakhar, to younger, more colourful imaginations like those of
Manish Arora and Baba Anand. Ram Rehman's eye for the quirky is as keen
as ever and Atul Dodiya's sleight of hand with the Taj Mahal is sheer
delight. This is an open-ended exhibition: much can be added, dropped
or re-configured. And the pop and kitsch tend to blur and overlap. Yet,
the idea shall remain as tantalising as ever. A must see, ji!
-S. Kalidas
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