LONGINGS OF THE EARTH UNDERSTANDING THE ARTISTIC PRACTICE OF DHANESHWAR SHAHThrough the nineties, contemporary
India and its art have become increasingly
urban centric. Locked in this myopia of an
urban gaze, there has been a movement
away from engaging with the ‘folk’ and
‘tribal’ either as art forms or as a way of life.
Th ere is an evident movement towards
cosmopolitan socio-political thematics, and
a renewed interest in the anthropocentric
and the experiential. One of the reasons
Dhaneshwar Shah’s works has been
drawing attention, is that his formal and
contextual engagements break away from
this monotonous urban haze. Th e artist
brings a modernist freshness yet retains a
deep contemporary fl avor
On the surface, Shah’s work seems to
be essentially engaging with the folk and
the animal kingdom. Th us one needs to
ask the question as to what is the nature
of engagement between the city bred artist
and his subject and form? One becomes
curious as to whether the engagement
betrays the romanticism of a colonizer or
a Diaspora? However one has to learn to
suspend these very questions if one has to
aesthetically communicate with Shah’s art
and his artistic practice. Th is is not because
the questions are irrelevant, but because
the critical restraint is important if we have
to stop ourselves from treating a body of
artworks only as a fi nished product, thus
marginalizing the process which an artist
goes through as he/she develops his/her
practice. In our ever growing academic
urge to decode and deconstruct signs and
practices, we forget that deconstruction is
just one aspect of knowledge and analysis.
One has to begin an engagement with
Shah’s work through understanding his
intention to give aesthetic delight (which
is diff erent from the notion of an aesthetic
spectacle), wherein the work can actually be
consumed through its formal value, and the
narrative recedes in the background.
With Shah, it is important to maintain
the form and content distinction because
their apparent locational similarity could
lead to an easy collapsing of the two. Our
obsessive urbanism leads us to read tribal
forms, traditional narrative structures and
animals as belonging to one realm. Th is
maybe true to a certain extent even from the
context of authorial intention. But this idea
of ‘to a certain extent’ is important. What is
the degree of slippage and what does that
lead one to. Moreover where does the word
“contemporary” sit in this engagement with
animals and traditional art forms? Apart from the fact that these ‘forms’ do exist in the
Contemporary and the obvious contemporary location of the gaze, what are the dynamics
with the contemporary experience?
Dhaneshwar is among the few rare young Indian artists, who displays a struggle with
language and style, focusing less on content and the fi nished image. He succeeds in not
being limited to a ‘beautiful’ stylization of the other, but actually manages to pose a critique
to the Contemporary, through a purely formal engagement. It was this impulsive critique
of urbanity that led Dhaneshwar on his fi rst trip to Bastar to shoot his fi rst documentary on
tribal art, an interest which has since been chased in anguish. In an attempt to broaden his
horizon, Shah has traveled beyond Bastar to the aboriginal heartlands of Australia where
he documented tribal art in Tanzania and made personal observations yet bypassing
the Anthropological. To an extent, he has simply gaped at the fascinating body of artistic
knowledge, and has carried an ‘innocent’ fascination about the commonalty of motifs and
design ideas.