Anish Kapoor. Shooting into the Corner. Mixed media. Dimensions variable. 2008-09. Installed at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2009. PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID MORGAN. IMAGE COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LISSON GALLERY, LONDON.

Seeing Red

What are a gigantic blob of wax, a cannon shooting coagulated gore and a cluster of silvery balls trying to tell us at Anish Kapoor's latest London solo? Zehra Jumabhoy airs her opinion.

BOMBAY-BORN ANISH KAPOOR'S SOLO EXTRAVAGANZA, WHICH overran gilt-edged rooms at the Royal Academy of Arts from the 26th of September to the 11th of December, took the delights of destruction seriously. With Svayambh ('self-generated' in Sanskrit) a 30-ton block of red wax shoved its way through the Academy's embellished archways on a motorized wooden platform, leaving a trail of violent-hued deposits in its wake. As a defiant dig at the aura of authority, which usually hovers around these Palladian precincts, we couldn't suppress a surge of glee at Svayambh (2007) - something akin to the guilty pleasure a 5-year old might feel at besmirching a pompous headmaster's office.

But such cheap thrills aside, Svayambh's tricks with perspective was also a take on the peculiar way we intuit time and distance. Svayambh supposedly moved at a constant speed, but we remained unconvinced of this fact. Sometimes, it seemed to be standing still. At others, its progress appeared maddeningly slow: the closer it got to the porticos, the longer it seemed to take to reach them. Yet, its spectacular transition from one room to the next transpired in a flash. So, Svayambh plonked us in a state of perpetual expectation: waiting for an event that was over before it began.

Svayambh's gargantuan mass was pregnant with other meanings too. Perhaps, it referenced the notion of "liminal spaces" that theorist Homi K Bhabha tells us to associate with artists who live in the diaspora - a.k.a the "in-between-ness" of cosmopolitan homelessness that Bhabha sees as conducive to multi-cultural conversations. For, Svayambh existed in a literal limbo: between corridors, pushing borders and contesting thresholds.