No I haven't decided to write about Star Wars.
It's the name of a current exhibition on at The Saatchi Gallery, comprised of work all by Indian artists.
Some things were really interesting, and some things were just downright bizarre, ranging from
a giant heart constructed of fibreglass decorated entirely with hundreds of bindis, to an enormous suitcase struggling to contain a camel!
This was a piece of work that was both interesting and bizarre.
It was an army of robots made up of what looked like bits of junk and light bulbs. The installation was slightly unnerving, which quickly changed to comical when I realised they looked like something out of a Pixar animation.
In the galleries upstairs I was drawn to a wall presenting an Indian graphic novel called Tales Of Amnesia, by an artist called Chitra Ganesh. But as I started to make my way through the images I found that it was almost, if not completely, impossible to follow; the characters just seemed to be sprouting creepy nonsense, and there were several images of women being fingered in the most bizarre and inappropriate situations for no explicable reason.
Annoyingly, The Saatchi Gallery don't put any explanations up next to the work, just the artist and date, which means that often you'll come across something and be completely baffled until you get home and look it up. I'd rather make a connection with the work right there in the gallery after reading a short description of it, rather than having to go home and understand it in hindsight whilst looking at a tiny thumbnail of the image that I'd just been to see.
Anyway, despite coming home and looking up the artist I only know that the graphic novel has something to do with feminism...
This was one of my favourite pieces of work: it was called ReRecord by Ajit Chauhan. It was simply made up of 162 record covers that had been 'erased' to leave only certain sections of the original cover intact. The result was an intriguing collection of disembodied faces; outlines of hair, mouths, bits of clothing. From far away they almost looked like artistically unfinished portraits. The work was meant to be a playful dig at marketing and its ephemeral nature.
However, the piece of work that had the biggest impact on me (although not actually part of the original exhibition) was 'American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (But Not Including the Wounded, Nor the Iraqis nor the Afghanis)'. The premise is simple; the artist, Emily Prince, draws a small portrait of every soldier who has died as a result of the war with Iraq, with their name and date of birth at the top, and then a small piece of information about them underneath e.g. if they were left handed, or played an instrument etc. The colour of the paper she draws on corresponds to the skin colour of the deceased.
These are then arranged around the gallery space in chronological order of death, and the result is stunningly simple and poignant. Prince's intention was to gain a sense of intimacy with these lives that are now lost, to familiarise herself with the people who risked and lost their lives for their country. She is trying to put people and faces to the numbers of fatalities that are reeled off in the news and in papers everyday.
The sad thing is, although she puts faces to names, names to numbers, there is simply so many. Although you want to go through every one and get to know them all, it would be impossible unless you were there for hours (and had a ladder for the slightly higher up ones).
They cease to just be numbers, and just become a sea of faces.
Images from: http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/
