The answers are neatly divided into four segments. In ‘Export’, the brief indicates that the collection traces the strategies used by artists asked to enact ‘Indian-ness’ in their work. Placed near the door is a Subodh Gupta fiberglass cow in pink, which is reportedly the first work by the artist acquired by Anupam Poddar, and placed close to it is Sheela Gowda’s Draupadi that has strands of thread attached to sewing needles, suspended from the ceiling.

If the grandness of Sudarshan Shetty’s multimedia wall of 1,000 replicas of the Taj Mahal in metal attracts attention, in ‘Outrageous’ the visitor is welcomed with a disclaimer that warns them of the subversive nature of some of the work. So, in a photo installation titled Vilas a naked Subodh Gupta is smeared in Vaseline and reclines on a sofa, and Atul Dodiya has a Mahatma Gandhi oil on canvas behind a metal shutter in B for Bapu.

While the curatorial endeavour to examine the ways in which artists engage with the larger public defines ‘Outrageous’, another, ‘Uncollectable’ is about the movement of objects through markets and into private collections. Some of the artworks are unwieldly for private space and provocative for the public realm. However, it is here that we see another popular artwork from Poddar’s collection—Love, Sudarshan Shetty’s life-size model of an antique cream-coloured Jaguar with a giant dinosaur mounting it from behind. From Poddar’s living room, this has shifted to the lower basement of Sirpur House till May when the exhibition ends.

... contd.