Sudarshan Shetty .Exhibit from Love. 2006

IThrough his exhibits, Shetty tried to create dramatic installations that spoke to an experience, that could be both, intimate and distant, immediate and far-fetched. No other emotion has been as over-glorified as love and no other experience has been as under-valued. The main exhibit in Shetty’s show comprised an installation with jars and vases in glass cases connected with pipes and tubes. Semen-white and blood-red liquids coursed furiously through these variously shaped and sized containers causing an overflow in various areas. Looking like a cross between a mad doctor’s medical laboratory and a wicked archivist’s museum of macabre artifacts, the exhibit foregrounded the idea of the body as a kinetic map of circulatory networks. The surge of passion, the flow and ebb of vital fluids, and the circuitry of pleasure and pain, were suggested, materialized, and memorialised. Easily the most successful of Shetty’s exhibits, this panel reminded us of some of his earlier works from Consanguinity (2003), that had brilliantly explored the sentimentality of decadent ardour.

Sudarshan Shetty. Exhibit from Love. 2006.

Unfortunately, Shetty’s critique of excess as an operating principle of love and life, did not continue through the other exhibits. In fact, the finish and the flash that the overall spectacular exhibition display possessed, seemed to overpower the capacity of the works to collectively launch a critique of love as an inflated ideal (is this how the medium overwhelms the message?). Shetty’s attempt at creating one spectacle to engage with another was a brave gambit – it did not however take into account the insidiousness with which the substance at the heart of a critical gesture could get contaminated. As exaggerated and extravagant objects get infected by the spells they cast on others, they fail to reach out and establish critical contact, becoming closed systems that exult in their glory and glamour.