Foretelling images

While visiting some of the past and upcoming art shows and their themes, it’s easy to suspect that artists were responding to some kind of premonition regarding terror’s widening reach. A case in point is Sunil Padwal’s solo show Myopia—scheduled to open at the Jehangir Art Gallery, Kala Ghoda, on December 3. This show is rife with images of terror and war. One work which chillingly stands out is that of a missile-like shadow hanging over a Google Earth image of Mumbai.

However, Padwal is not an oracle. It is just the ability of artists like him to uncover the truths and those images that are already there but are never talked about in times of calm and peace. “The image of terror looming over Mumbai has been in my mind for over a year now. But I was horrified to see an almost identical image of Mumbai seen from Google Earth on the television, showing the areas hit by the terror attack. I feel very disturbed by this. It’s a sensitive issue that needs to be handled gently. It cannot be sensationalised,” says the artist. He was at Krsna Mehta’s Bombay Masti exhibition at The Bombay Store on Wednesday evening minutes before the attack on Café Leopold. “My wife Tanuja and I wanted to go to Trident for dinner but it was through the grace of God that we changed our mind,” informs the artist.

“My endeavour while creating these images on the canvas is to make them generic. However, the fact that the violence is so close and tangible is disturbing,” says Santosh. The artist’s haunting image of Your Terrorist our Freedom Fighter finely depicts his thoughts. The fact that the reasons behind such attacks have been ignored, surfaces here.

New media artist Shilpa Gupta feels it’s just a matter of time before the violence reached our city. “We constantly say that terrorism does not have a religion. But it is this very attitude that has led to the eruption of violence. Our politicians have to address the reason why people are doing this, you can’t turn the other way and not listen to the actual problem,” says Gupta, whose works have recently been based out of Jammu and Kashmir.

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