Dynamic Space; Eclectic Art

Meera Menezes visits the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in the NCR and points out some of the teething problems involved in the transformation of a private collection into a public museum.

TOUCH, NAVJOT ALTAF’S LARGE, RED FIBREGLASS SCULPTURE PROVIDES A SPLASH of warmth to the cool foyer of the spanking new Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA). Housed as it is, within the sprawling campus of the leading global IT services company HCL Technologies Ltd., the KNMA was formally inaugurated in January 2010 with its aptly titled inaugural show, Open Doors. Given its location, Open Doors was meant as an invitation not just to the cognoscenti but also to the uninitiated and was conceptualized by the in-house curator Roobina Karode.

The exhibition served the purpose of offering a peek into the extensive private collection of Kiran Nadar, whose husband Shiv Nadar heads HCL. Nadar started collecting art in the late ’80s, with her first major acquisitions consisting of two works by M.F. Husain and one by Manjit Bawa, which she had commissioned. Over the years, she collected art with a voracious appetite and has been a keen buyer at auctions.

So, how did the idea of transposing her collection into the public domain occur to her? According to Nadar, “This came about three or four years ago when I was collecting and putting works into storage. It was a wasteful exercise because I never really see the work that is in storage. I decided I wanted to do something more meaningful, putting it up in a place open to the public and the idea of setting up a small museum was born”.

Karode zeroed in on 48 pieces of art spanning several decades featuring India’s modern and contemporary art. Most of the works on display are wall-mounted, large-sized canvases; there are sculptures by Ravinder Reddy, Venkat Bothsa, Navjot Altaf and Subodh Gupta (his intriguing cycle-rickshaw installation, Cheap Rice). The eclectic KNMA collection includes works, among others, by Raja Ravi Varma, the PAG artists, V. S. Gaitonde and Arpita Singh, besides younger practitioners like Atul Dodiya, G. R. Iranna and T.V. Santhosh. Also on show is an unusual oil on canvas by Jamini Roy apart from Anish Kapoor’s stainless steel and lacquer work, last espied at the India Art Summit 2009.

In an attempt to create a dialogue between the disparate works in the collection, Karode has made some unusual juxtapositions. She has placed Raqib Shaw next to Bhupen Khakhar; Manjit Bawa is in close proximity to Surendran Nair and Jagannath Panda is opposite Gulammohammed Sheikh’s Speechless City. As she elucidates, “I have been interested in looking at similar themes addressed by artists from different generations and their approach and temperament revealed by their visual articulation.” While the works of Shaw and Khakhar explore sexuality, Bawa and Nair’s canvases deal with the interpretation of the mythological theme of Krishna lifting Mount Govardhan. Sheikh and Panda use the metaphor of the city to ruminate on issues of the Emergency and community displacement respectively. Not all the pairings, however, are this successful – the positioning of Nicholas Roerich next to N.S. Harsha’s Nations left this viewer baffled, for example.

There are certain challenges that the museum faces at present. The KNMA is currently confined to a temporary space of about 15,000 sq. ft. which includes storage. Housed in what was the cafeteria, the space has its own limitations, including lighting, the ceiling and door heights. Access is still an issue as one cannot just drop by, the institution being situated off the Greater Noida Expressway rather than in town. Only the die-hard art enthusiast would make the trip there, apart from employees of the company.