Yamini Nayar. Cleo. C-print. 30" x 40". Edition of 5 (+2 AP). 2009.

Worlds Coming Apart

Abhay Sardesai engages with Yamini Nayar's intensely crafted photographs and Sheela Gowda's sensitively mounted installation.

HOW DO SPACES INFLECT EACH OTHER ACROSS dynamic socio-architectural and cultural-memorial axes? This is one of the questions Yamini Nayar and Sheela Gowda ask in Arrested Views, a two-artist show mounted at the Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, from April 7th to May 9th.

Yamini Nayar designs interior spaces out of what look like overused and discarded materials, which she then proceeds to capture photographically. Intuitively constructed and often with vandalized objects, the messy spaces seem to simulate territorial carcasses with fragile after-lives. In Far Between, torn, shimmering curtain-wings frame a black hydra-headed form rising from the middle of a foam-filled bed against a wall with scratched, brown patterned wallpaper. The same forbidding sculptural shape is seen through the flowing tatters of a white cloth draped over the frame of a fourposter bed against a wall partially covered with an orange patterned wallpaper in Between the Lines. What kind of a theatre is Nayar exposing us to? Her reassembled worlds bring home South Asian warfronts but also domestic settings emptied of the human presence, where unequal acts of passion have been enacted and accords negotiated under duress.In Cleo, for instance, we come across a surreal eye pasted on a makeshift screen in a closed part of a devastated room - it stares at you over a wooden floor that has been brutally ripped out. What is remarkable is that though Nayar probes the contract between battle-scarred objects and the spaces they occupy, she refrains from wistfully memorializing their scarred pasts. It would be tempting for her at this juncture to construct a sentimentally conceived archive of effects - by giving in to nostalgia as an agency she could engage with what one might call the romance of the ruin or the lure of the fragment. By underscoring the constructedness of the chaos and the deliberate nature of the debris, Nayar investigates instead the very act of performing documentation even as her careful staging strategies complicate the protocols of representation.

Yamini Nayar. Far Between. C-print. 30" x 40". Edition of 5 (+2 AP). 2009.