One form moves into another, projecting the spirit of longing and the quest?one language moves into another, preserving the wordless ecstasy. This is how the thirteenth century poet Rumi described the dilemmas a thinking and creative human being faces in troubled times.
One is grateful to the film-maker, artist and designer Muzaffar Ali to have created visual works to map the trials of our times in a manner that allows us to face them coolly.
Muzaffar has a considerable battery of talent to accomplish the five-finger exercises that have drawn on various skills like textured colleges, wood-inlay, reliefs and calligraphy, all of which contribute to objects of style now showing at the Sridharani Gallery in Delhi. They are sophisticated works, something we find lacking in our exceedingly vulgar times. But I wonder if they are too sophisticated to contain the challenge over times pose in terms of an adequate response? I got the same sense of a good deal of healthy creative concern but lack of adequacy in handling issues in the interesting video art films produced by a number of artists from different countries which are being shown by Adelina von Furstenberg of Art for the World and the Nature Morte Gallery at the India Habitat Centre. It was interesting to see video art from different countries. There were video by Stefano Boccalini (Italy), Sylvie Fleury (Switzerland), Dimitri Kozaris (Greece), Armin Linke (Germany), Gianni Motti (Switzerland), Sarkis (France) and Peter Friedel (Belgium).
One must understand that the video image is a transitory one, so depth of communication must be ensured. Otherwise trite and confused messages might result, as in Boccalini?s Wild Island that shows the private takeover of a public park in Milan. Privatisation of a public space can be seen as a ?liberation? when it is the reverse.
In the same way, the inhuman treatment meted out to a Russian ship?s captain is trivialised with scenes from a millionarie?s cruise vessel interspered with shots of him. In the same way, footage of the American millionaress Ivana Trump with Arial Sharon fails to communicate the horror that decaying capitalism develops in the name of social progress. But the best video was that of Nam Jun Paik, a Korean artist who first managed to tamper with the path of electrons inside the cathode ray tube and creates an art video as early as 1963. Today, a number of Indian artists have make their forays into this field, especially an extremely simple one by Rameshwar Broota presenting the rat race in interspersed shots of horses and human beings put through their paces.
So, what really gives art its special feeling is the in-depth research into colour, line, form and texture as one sees in the work of Ashok Bhowmick at the Kumar Gallery, the sensitive feel for colour is the work of Prafulla Mohanti at the Dhoomimal Art Centre and the works of a new young artist, Ganga Singh, at Gallery Ganesha.