When every work requires you to stop for at least a few minutes to absorb the intricacy in the carefully assembled objects, you know that this is no ordinary show. New York based artist Samanta Batra Mehta brings together a potpourri of antique and vintage objects for her debut solo show in India, at Delhi’s Shrine Empire Gallery, and creates the aura of a bygone era albeit in a contemporary language.
Titled The Other Side of Time, Batra Mehta’s show is inspired by Cabinets of Curiosities, an encyclopaedic collection in the Renaissance period, where historians, scientists and artists collected specimens from nature, religious relics, scientific instruments and other oddities that later held great significance as museum artefacts.
Hence, on a deep blue wall of the gallery, you can find a neat assemblage of postcards written from the smallest of towns and provinces in colonial India, antiquarian books juxtaposed with plastic plants bought from China and Thailand, original historical maps from the 1800s and early 1900s rolled inside antique bottles, decorative paper cut outs on vintage shoe moulds – all belonging to Batra Mehta’s personal collection.
“I have used these antique, vintage objects as a reflection of a journey through my family history, childhood nostalgia, parenthood and, moving beyond the realm of the personal, towards themes in gender constructs, socio-cultural order and post-colonial theory. As an Indian artist living in New York for the past decade, I wanted to raise issues of identity, dislocation and migration,” says the 39-year-old mother of two.
No wonder then, Batra Mehta’s personal favourite piece in the show is a cabinet filled with antiquarian maps, prints, collaged texts from antiquarian books, vintage medicinal and laboratory glass. Titled The Other Side of Time, from where the show takes its name, the work specifically reflects the artist’s ongoing engagement with the Partition of India. “I recall the journey my grandparents made when they left their homes and belongings in Pakistan to start a new life as refugees in independent India. The cabinet stands as a remembrance to all those who made this tumultuous crossing. I have used sections of original antiquarian maps and engravings of British India, collaged text and imagery from antiquarian books on contemporary printed material, vintage medicinal and laboratory glass containers, vintage daguerreotypes and tintypes to re-create this time of the past.”
In another evocative installation titled Rites of Passage – made up of decoupage on wooden shoe moulds bought from antique markets in the US and dating back to the 1940s and 1960s – the artist reflects on her personal state of flux due to her migration from India even while accepting that her adopted foreign land is the only home that her children know. She says: “The work is a play on the words being ‘routed’ and being ‘rooted’. A ‘rite of passage’ usually refers to a family ritual milestone such as births, coming of age, marriage, death.”
The show, however, is not only about Batra Mehta’s personal history. The collage of vintage postcards titled Anthem is one such example. “I found these vintage postcards dating back to 1945-1950, sent during the time of the end of British rule in India and the Partition. On these, I collaged imagery of the human nervous system culled from antiquarian medical journals. One some of the postcards, I have collaged the first paragraph of Nehru’s ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech. Cast against the backdrop of political history and the history of the nation, are millions of untold stories of the time – my work aims to retell these untold stories – I wonder who these people were, what their situation was, what their stories were?”
Scheduled to have her next solo exhibition at Mumbai’s Sakshi Gallery next year, Batra Mehta will continue to tell more such intriguing stories.
The Other Side of Time is on at Shrine Empire, 7, Friends Colony (West), New Delhi till May 18, 2013
Poonam Goel is a freelance journalist and has covered the arts for over 15 years. She contributes on visual arts for various newspapers, magazines and online media. More about her on Story Wallahs. Write to her @ poonamgoel2410@gmail.com