Soul Purpose -Channel 6

Sheet Happen -Time Out Bangalore

One Monday last month, as the city slipped into the bustling rhythms of the morning, Dimple Shah began supervising the unloading of 15 boxes from a truck that had driven up to Gallery Sumukha. She was just emerging from about with conjunctivitis, which she contracted before undertaking a train journey to the city from Baroda– but with a tight schedule leading up to the opening of her latest show Catharsis in a Forbidden Zone, Shah couldn't afford to let physical discomfort derail her work.

Over the next few days the artist had the formidable job of unpacking 400 kgs of material and getting her show ready. Possibly the most daunting task – setting up the extraordinary piece titled “Catharsis Chamber” – a shower cubicle that she designed, surrounded by PVC curtains and shelves made of acrylic sheets. Once the basic structure of the cubicle was ready, Shah would have to line the shelves with 1,800 medicine bottles, each one filled with either ash, salt, hair or nail clippings, to create a room for a viewer to enter, a space permeated with a sense of privacy and almost ritualistic calm.

“I initially wanted to use pieces of my own nails for the work,” said Shah, who, while talking about her work, veers between earnestness and giggly delight (the former, in this case). “I started collecting clippings two years ago.” Does that mean she’s been planning the details of this show for the last two years? “No,” she clarified. “I just have a habit of collecting things which I might decide to use. I would have used my own clippings, but in a few days I found that they had started attracting ants, so I threw them away. I don’t know why ants were interested in my nails. Maybe the ants inBaroda[where Shah studied, at the Maharaja Sayajirao University] are a little mad.”

The clippings that finally became a part of the show were artificial, procured by Shah after scouring dozens of beauty shops. But there was a problem. “They looked terrible, too artificial and white. My friend and I sat and painted each individual clipping so that it looked a little more natural.” What about the hair in the other bottles? “That’s my hair,” said Shah. “I collected it over two years.”

The sense of theatricality in Shah’s installation work is perhaps explained by the fact that, for many years, she’s had a parallel interest in performance art. Through her training inBaroda, she held performance art shows in which she herself featured, often rendered unrecognisable by blotches of paint. And over the years, photographs of these performances showed up in Shah’s print works and paintings, along with other traces of herself – an image of an eye, a hand print, a diary entry.

“You might enjoy this,” said Shah, momentarily distracted in the middle of going over slides of her work, and flipping open a notebook crammed with preparatory notes and sketches.

A glance through its pages suggested an almost obsessive bent of mind. Reams of notes about psychoanalytic concepts jostle for space with conceptual diagrams, such as the ones of imaginary scientific apparati that Shah ended up fabricating out of copper for Forbidden Zone.

In creating these apparati, and, indeed, in all her explorations into the show’s central theme of alchemy, Shah seems to be responding to a need to explain the inexplicable, and to organise the chaotic storm of ideas that rage through her mind. And while some of her earlier works can bewilder the viewer just because of the sheer number of elements used, in newer works like “Catharsis Chamber” these impulses are expressed simply, with an immediate and undeniable power.

Showing off the sketch of a piece of apparatus, which didn’t make it to the final show, Shah said it was a challenge to get vendors to carry out her orders. “They go crazy when I show them what I want done,” she said. “They’re used to normal orders. I have to spend days with them. They eat my head, and I eat their heads.”

These tedious transactions more than exhausted her, Shah admitted. “Every single work seems to take a toll on my body,” she said, gesturing towards the example of her infected eye. Then, a smile appearing, and her tone growing kinder, “But it doesn’t matter. After all, art is about hard work.”

Ajay Krishnan
Time Out Bangalore
October 01 2010 7.14am

To cleanse from within

Dimple B Shah gives an expression to catharsis through Paintings, Installations and Sculptures

Dimple Shah with her paintings. Photo: Sangeetha Devi Dundoo, The Hindu.

The first installation that greets visitors at Kalakriti Art Gallery is a shower chamber, which Dimple B Shah calls the ‘Katharsis Chamber’. The curtains of the shower place bear psychological theories of Carl Rogers, the process of Calcination and the glass walls of the chamber are lined with rows of tiny bottles. Nothing is here for ornamentation of by accident, says the artist. The bottles are filled with shreds of hair, nails and ash. An recorded audio completes the picture providing the sound of water streaming in.

‘Kartharsis in Forbidden Zones’ is an exhibition of installations, paintings and sculptures that communicate Dimple’s ideas. It took her three and a half years to complete this series, she tells us. “The installations took time. Once I worked on the concept and made detailed sketches, I took help of carpenters and technicians who cut acrylic sheets, wooden and iron planks. I scouted junk shops and found a 100-year-old shop selling old bottles and sourced these for the installation. For another installation, I needed wheels of a cart and after much trial and error, I travelled to Baroda to find the kind of wheels I was looking for,” she says. 

Dimple’s paintings reflect her study of metals, their properties and their effect on our lives. While studying art in Glasgow, she researched on Jain philosophy and imagery. “I came across a book on metals, alchemy and equated what I read to the seven basic planets in astrology and the seven chakras described in yoga. I learnt about lead and it’s correlation to Saturn. I read that nail samples of criminals have an increased lead content in them. I also came to know that women have more traces of copper in them. It was fascinating as I dug deeper into metals and the way they affect us,” she explains. In one of her paintings, Dimple uses a chameleon to represent the changing state of mercury. A glass jar with a sample of the metal corresponding to her paintings and a page from her workbook, detailing her paintings and installation are there for the audience to correlate and introspect.

Dimple completes her work through a performance. She’s been supplementing her work with a performance since her college days in 2001. Her performance has no dialogues, doesn't fall strictly into the realms of theater though Dimple has studied theater. For an earlier exhibition titled Saffron Borders, she gave vent to people’s fear psychosis in the aftermath of the Godhra riots by encircling herself with a ring of fire and reacting to it. “This is the way I connect with people through a visual medium of Painting, Sculpture, Installation of expressing my thoughts by way of performance,” she says. 

What’s interesting is this artist did her bachelors in commerce before shifting gears to fine arts. “After B. Com I realized I was truly interested in arts and did a five-year bachelor course in visual arts, followed by masters in M.S University, Baroda and one year in Glasgow,” she smiles. As a parting shot, she admits installations don’t come cheap. “I am yet to sell any of  them. But I don’t think of returns when I work on an idea,” she says.

Sangeetha Devi Dundoo,

The Hindu, Hyderabad, March 8, 2013

"Kartharsis in Forbidden Zones" an exhibition of Paintings, Illustrations, Prints & Sculpture 

is on at Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad till March 13.

For Reconciliation

Sethu Samudram Project, India-Srilanka collaborative project curated by Suresh Jayaram

It has been some years since #1 Shanthi Road started the Sethu Samudram project allowing interaction between local artists and their Sri Lankan counterparts from Theertha. In the face of earlier and grave recent history linking both countries as well as effecting in conflict, it has been dominated by geographic, socio-political and cultural issues, their pronouncement being as important as seeking a common ground and reconciliation. 

Although sadly, art still does not reach anyone beyond the Art circles proper, such ventures remain vital. Previous efforts of the artists who often participate continuously and of Suresh Jayaram, the moving spirit behind it all, have contributed then to their fleshing out during the recent joint residency, whose character was led by his curatorial guidance or perhaps only stimulus. 

The resulting exhibition from November 1st to 9th had two young participants from both lands led by the desire for overcoming the three decades of a complex and destructive war by reference, evocation and by drawing the onlooker into the mainly interactive installations. 

The Bangalore artists seemed to approach the task in a compassionate and encompassing way. With much immediacy in visual and emotive terms, Dimple Shah, using the act of erasure of suffering images and by gifting sea salt, engaged the opponent aggressiveness, victims and perpetrators of violence on all the sides, her own gesture and the visitor’s active response through an appeal for mercy and at the same time for forgiveness.

The work of  Prakash L was sincere too, perturbed and empathic, whereas the metaphorical content partly came through, as the blood running through the tubes forming a soldier’s boot, menacing over crematorium shots spoke of rebirth and renewal. Yet it partly remained unclear and unconvincing. One would have wished for an equally loaded and forgiveness-seeking position from the Sri Lankans who, however, preferred a cooler, statement-like, approach. 

“A Story of Dhal and Onion” by Prasanna Ranabahu and Lalith Manage was an accordion book with words and photographic prints alluding to the 1983 war with its ideological, commercial and psychological aspects whose realities, though, needed elucidation here. 

Manage’s T-shirts for sale calling for contact through the use of Sinhala, Tamil, Kannada and English scripts along with rangoli dotted lines was a nice but somewhat over-used idea.

Marta Jakimowicz

19 November 2012,  Deccan Herald,Bangalore.

Photographs by - B.S. Shivaraju (Cop Shiva)

Contemporary Voices - Compiled from interviews by Waswo X. Waswo

In early August I asked a selection of younger artists to talk about their work via answering a short questionnaire. All of these artists have been, or currently are, highly involved with printmaking as a medium. The artists questioned were: B. Karuna, Dhruv Sonar, Dimple Shah, Jagadeesh T.R., Kurma Nadham, L.N. Bhuvaneshwari, Maripelly Praveen Goud, Prathap Modi, Moutushi, Neeraj Singh Khandka, Prabhakar Alok, Preeti Agrawal, Rajan Fulari, Rajesh Deb, Soghra Khurasani, and Srikanta Paul. Below are selections from their varied responses.

L.N. Bhuvaneshwari:  My imagery has often been things like motorcycles and ceiling fans. Reality can never be completely reproduced, so I grew curious about what happens to the essence of an image when it is bent and squiggled by the human hand. The cement and metal plants of a factory, the automobiles...hard iron and jagged-edged reality gained strangely soft edges when isolated from their harsh surroundings. But my fascination with machines didn't end there. In some ways they seemed essential, in others, senseless. Reality became fraught with uncertainties, paradoxes, limited joys and infinite anguish, all speeding towards an unknown direction, a symbolic representation of human progress, destructibility, creative goodness and its inherent evil. Carving, etching and printing became to me a means of seeking harmony and integration.

Maripelly Praveen Goud:  I am more fascinated with science, technology and mathematics. I use science diagrams, schematic drawings, circuits, electrical elements and other images in my prints. I started working on portraits (the black portrait series) and gradually made them more conceptual. Always my works questioned “originality”. For example, one of my prints which is titled MODERNIZATION, tells how culture and tradition is slowly vanishing in villages and technology is reaching almost everywhere. This is partially personal experience because I myself migrated from a village to the cities.