On a Saturday night in a crowded square at New Friends Colony Market,a gaping crowd had gathered outside Renu Modis Gallery Espace,attempting to analyse a performance that perhaps made little or no sense to them. A person of indeterminate gender lay topless on a piece of concrete caressing the stone with his eyes closed. Beneath the concrete was a layer of cotton. Six working class men,dressed in lungies,were also lying on stones,with their eyes closed,though some of them looked a bit unsure. This,as the passers-by soon realised,was a performance art piece by Chinese artist Han Bing. Meanwhile,inside the gallery,the art cognoscenti held their glasses of wine,humming and hawing over the quality of works by Bings other works the kind suspended from the walls. Bing is is showing in India for the first time,alongside the well-known,if controversial,works of Mumbai-based artist Tejal Shah. Shahs photographs,video works and installations are a collection of old and new works that visit the realities and fantasies of marginalised genders commonly known as eunuchs. Bings performance and photo-based art explores the boundaries between the profane and sacred,attributing an erotic interpretation to everyday objects,especially tools of manual labour and construction. Before we move onto the bigger question of whether a gimmicky performance works in a public space,let us first take in the basic outlines the exhibition titled A Cry from the Narrow Between is an effort to bring together a dialogue between Shah and Bing,both of whose vastly different works address the same issue of forbidden,unspeakable desire and the violence that is often a result when the boundaries of gender are crossed. The vision that Shah had,when she met the Beijing-based Bing was to bring their disparate worlds together to address the common concern. I started this body of work between 2005-06 with individuals from the hijra (transsexual) community from Mumbai and Bangalore. I began speaking with individuals with whom I had developed a close relationship,probing their desires and how they saw themselves in a utopian world, says Shah about her fantasy series What Are You? Her latest work talks of police brutality. Shah has orchestrated a photograph of a hijra lying at the feet of a policeman,as a ticker tape text unfurls on the wall,narrating incidents of rape. My work is more focused on the human costs of urbanised modernisation, says Bing who has worked with photographs and a multimedia performance installation titled Love in the Age of Big Construction. As to whether this worked in the public space,it was very clear that there was no introduction to the goings-on for the general public,though Bing interacted with street children and onlookers later. One of the special parts of this performance was working with migrant labour. I was born in a small village and know what it feels like to be a stranger in a big city. I dialogued at length with the workers and wanted them to just play themselves. The show continues till April 3,call 26326267
