Urban spaces, even at their alluring best engender an apocalyptic vision; the vision of a ghost city. Nobody belongs to these spaces. Urbanization is both a planned and organic process. It thrives through the economic and demographic management. Agricultural lands are acquired, habitats are redesigned, facilities are enhanced, streets are laid out and custom made architectures are established in the process of urbanization. The growth of economy is directly proportionate to the proliferation of urbanization and the demographic management is achieved through the exclusion and inclusion of human beings in its process. The UN-Habitat Report 2006 says that by the middle of 2007, the majority of human population would be living in urban places.

Though it draws a lucrative picture of human growth in terms of material progression, urbanization could be called an illusionary project. Urban spaces, purposefully designed for capital and profit oriented activities, in fact do not allow those people who make this conversion of capital into profit possible to dwell permanently there. They are forced to become ‘professionals’ specially invited for the aforementioned capital conversion. However, the process of urbanization facilitates an uninvited human inflow towards these urban spaces, which these people try to see as a field where their dreams could turn into material realities.

Like a volatile beast, urban spaces eject both the professionals and the uninvited invaders towards their margins, provide them with look-alike materialistic surroundings through the simulation of the notion called the ‘urbane’. These glittering margins that simulate the actual urban spaces are called ‘suburbs’. In current theoretical parlance they are qualified as ‘exurbia’, ‘satellite cities’, ‘suburbs’, ‘net work cities’ and ‘post modern cities’. Suburbs are both the byproduct and the necessary deposits of urbanization. It demarcates the rural and agricultural (land and economy) from the urban and industrial/IT (land and economy). Suburbs negotiate the inflow of the human beings towards the urban centers and at the same time they function as check dams of such inflows. In the case of human rights and aspirations, suburbs throw their lot with the rural and the agricultural and for its greedy progression towards the ‘transcendence of existence’ (both in material and spiritual terms, to be precise in class and caste terms) they vow their allegiance with the urban.

This double bind of the suburbs brings forth a new reality; a reality of role reversals. It is not urbanization that actually happens in the process of urbanization, but suburbanization is what happens through out. Active urbanization results in the absorption of the existing suburbs through redesigning and planning, thereby giving birth to new exurbias. In this sense, we could say that urbane spaces are transitory spaces that keep changing its complexion by absorption and rejection whereas suburbs are the real spaces that negotiate the existence of the urban spaces through a resistance and contestations.

Artists, through out the history, have tried to capture the essence of the urban spaces in their works. During the period of industrialization artists found urban spaces equally enchanting and challenging. They scaled the length and breadth of the urban spaces as anonymous flanuers in order to reflect on the beauty and terror that these spaces imparted to them. Cities were even considered as museums by the 20th century philosopher Walter Benjamin, where one could see themselves as viewers and producers. Through their loitering they could defy the orderliness of urbanization and feel the seeds of revolution growing. However, with the advent of active planning and governance and also with the advent of the notion of ‘terrorism’, the contemporary urban spaces have become inaccessible, in strictest terms, even to the artists.

In our times, suburbs are the places of ideological contestations. Right from the basic needs like fresh air, potable water to parking space, exurbias have internalized the new forms of terror and also have learned new strategies to address them. Artists find suburbs as potential fields and markers for the production of aesthetics. Recognizing acceptance and rejection by the urban spaces, artists retreat to the suburban realities, commuting between the comforts of the urban and the terror of the suburban (often read and comprehended the other way round), artists capture the seeds of existence and existential disturbance in their works. This indicates that the post industrial and current IT society too has re-presented more or less the same issues that were confronted and addressed by the artists of the last century.

This show of four young artists namely, Indrajit Prasad, Madhao Imartey, Sudarshan Gupta and Sukhjeet carries a title ‘(Sub)Urban Texts’ for certain reasons. All these four artists come from suburban backgrounds and also they currently live in suburbs. However, their daily engagements with life depend heavily on the urban visions. The urban codes that connect the suburbs with the urban spaces and also demarcate their own fields of existence from the rural, take a prominent role in the production of their visual imageries. There are images of cables lines, electricity towers, plastic chairs and there are images of growth and decay. Certain imageries refer to the innards of high tech gadgets where the origin of human beings too comes to be visualized as programmed codes on circuit panels.

Indrajit Prasad creates stark images like a monkey doing an acrobat act, a sofa with a dancing leg, a bunch of flowers in plastic envelope, a caged bird picture, a split table with a hand pump hovering above, a flower pot beneath a heap of construction materials and so on against rather a graying background. The background in all these works simulate the grim colours of the plastic carry bags seen abundantly as a use material and waste material in the sub/urban spaces. All the images are presented as if they were seen through the film of these bags. As an individual concerned with the depletion of environmental standards Indrajit Prasad gives accent to this particular reality in his works.

The precarious positioning of the images and also replacing the image of an actual bird with a photograph of it inside the cage, for Indrajit Prasad exemplify the terror of existence. Here the terror, which is otherwise sounded out to the lives of ordinary human beings in the urban residues, is subtly handled and they verge to the realm of an uncanny poem. Terror of an urban space and how it finds its reflection in the suburb is a persisting issue for Madhao Imartey. The artist codes them in the forms of decay by generating a garden of decay and disease.

Imartey imagines his location of suburb as a place for junks; the junks, which could even take the form of virile male animals with erect and throbbing organs. There is a constant movement in his works like the undulation of landscapes and the criss-crossing of electricity towers animates the junkyard like a ghosts’ dance floor. There is a bit of surrealism in Imartey’s imaginations. The animated junks, including the moving vehicles with a Baconian or Ernst Neizvestnian twist expose their decaying innards, foretelling the imminent terror. The graphically collapsing type writer, perhaps heralds the death of a golden age and the hope he retains in the drawing of a kerosene stove. A restrained critique on the urban visions however, does not diminish the intentionality of the artist who reflects rather nostalgically on a golden time.

Commuting between the suburbs and the main city of Mumbai through the ‘local’ trains provide any sensitive soul with visions that even John Milton would have cherished to have while he wrote ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Paradise Regained’. Squeezing the quails that one experience in these journeys into metaphors of modern age communication is the strategy that Sudarshan Gupta uses in to create his repertoire of paintings. His protagonist is a lonely man who has a pronounced aversion towards the ‘busy-ness’ of the city. Through this detached protagonist, Sudarshan Gupta visualizes the urban and the suburban as a system of constructions and communications. The sophisticated renderings of an electric tower with a man finding an interim heaven at its middle, a brooding man in the middle of a whirlpool of plastic chairs, a man crossing a construction site, an emblematic representation of several bunches of keys, a playful rendition of a mirror being taken across a street, which reflects the street itself etc. play the role of links in Sudarshan’s works.

Sukhjeet works in ceramics. Mostly ceramic artists deal with the formal values of clay that are more conducive to handle the aspect of growth and decay. Sukhjeet, a devoted ceramist, however gives thematic expansion to his ceramic works even when he deals with ‘growth and decay’. Oscillating between existential dilemmas and environmental concerns, Sukhjeet’s works try to articulate how polished surfaces can reflect deeper philosophical aspects. Both in the organic formations and in the structural constructions, Sukhjeet plays with the idea of human communication. His is a world of isolation, despite the turbulence of happenings around. A work titled ‘Searching’ shows a hand trying to reach out to a host of hangers and functions as the pivotal work in Sukhjeet’s ensemble of works.

The experience of (Sub) Urban spaces expressed through the works of these four artists does not sum up the possibilities of articulating the urban and the suburban. These works belong to a part of the continuum and they need the viewers’ attention mainly because they announce the arrival of four new artists who dare re-address one of the major themes of our times; the theme of sub/urban spaces.

JohnyML, New Delhi, July 2007