Shasha Liu
2009 Mar 14 Beijing Gallery Crawl: My Little India at Marella Gallery
India’s “exotic” status often hinders any real understanding of Indian people and culture. The exhibition “My Little India” attempts to demystify India’s contemporary art scene through a fine curatorial selection of five young to mid-career artists of Indian descent. Reena Kallar’s sequence of photographs uses an hourglass filled with grains of long Indian rice covered with the names of missing persons to contemplate loss; Chitra Ganesh’s two holographic pieces – which depict a Bollywood beauty’s face flashing between images of rotting flesh and pristine perfection with words stating “the ocean itself a memory, our two time bombs ticking” -- reveals the crudity of temporariness. Tejal Shah’s performative photographs recreate images from the historical book Invention of Hysteria, unveiling the complex relationship between photography and it’s use in the documentation of colonialism from the mid 19th century.



