Installation view
A sea of people swarm a charismatic figure right in the center of the frame. His face is languid; he has come to expect this mass adulation with rehearsed equanimity. Any other person would worry to find themselves in the middle of such frenzied hysteria. But the mystic, maybe even a deity of his times, is unperturbed. Emerging atop a formidable SUV, his perimeter secured by two layers of security, he looks on forward, his gaze firmly secured away from his devotees. A distant horizon appears in the backdrop, washed in an iridescent, golden hue. It is a moment suspended in time – the ambiguity of whether it is dawn or dusk heightened by a palate that reveals little, insinuates a lot.
Vinod Balak’s latest solo exhibition is a powerful, often unsettling, exploration of a particular conjuncture and the Anthropos that it begets. To be sure, human forms – pervasive as they may be in all his compositions – do not exclusively render his imagination legible. Instead, it is first incumbent upon us, the viewers, to see them in the entanglements, conjunctions in which they appear. In “The Garden of the Rebel”, a solitary figure is foregrounded feeding pigeons, surrounded by numerous potted plants – the only verdant vegetation a megalopolis permits. But those plants are supported in their growth by raised arms clenched in a fist – an unmistakable allusion to the communist leanings of Balak’s home state of Kerala.
In “When We Last Touched Each Other”, humans appear in a moment of excessive consumption. They appear not quite dissimilar to each other – the colour of their skin in stark contrast to the bright colours of their clothing, or the abundance of food on every single table, marks them as a collective without distinguishing markers. These artistic choices made by Balak speak to the remarkable promise of urbanscapes – a site where individual colour distinctions diminish but collectively produce a spectrum that is still notable for its suggestive blushes. A group of men hold up a massive soccer ball while in ”The Showcase of a Patriot”, a life-sized soccer ball spins on an axis of Balak’s toes. These surreal constructions reveal the modes in which our world(s) needs to be held together, suspended even, through human ingenuity; not unlike the mythic moments in which the Dashavataras lend stability, support to a world gone asunder.
Humans enacting demi-god purposes may as well extrapolate into a frightening moment of composition with which we began this piece. Dystopia lurks in every single frame on display. The uniform bright gold palate that informs each setting, whether in external settings or one that lights up the interior space of “Patriot” through a ceiling lamp compel us to see the worlds of Balak in continuum. Could the self-portrait in the “Patriot” also be the mystical, demagogue of “My Halo is your Grandeur”; their identical forward-looking gaze being a subtle hint at what monsters we carry within? After all, the tropes of continuities are so saturated in his works that they make detection of “time” – the conjuncture alluded to above – impossible to establish. Of his own admission, Balak began the present oeuvre of works just as we were coming out of the horrors of an isolating, global pandemic. Unable to work on his art, while he sequestered in the subtropical climatic make up of Kerala, Balak resumed his labour in Delhi. His compositions harken to this double bind of a world in which he now lives and a world that is intuitively more familiar to him. Through recurring motifs of soccer, the contained greenery of potted plants, and the attendant revolutionary imagery, Balak is constantly seeking to fuse his worlds together.
For the initiated, it is nearly impossible not to see traces of Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Balak’s present oeuvre. The surreal quality that Balak lends to his works – the psychosexual fantasies, the dismembered bodies, the parasitic surfeit of commodities – all seem like a playful reminder of what Benjamin alerts us to: the pitfalls of losing sight of authenticity. We will do well to remember that Benjamin and the set of scholars that coalesced around the Frankfurt Institute were themselves grappling with, what at the time seemed to them, the inexplicable mass appeal of fascism in their society.
His diptych as well as the bookshelf in “Patriot” hold the key to the horrors that Balak is pushing us to look at. The surfeit action figurines, painted in identical replication of each other, first suggests a homogeneity that transcends time. But upon closer inspection, the action figurines depict men in combat fatigues, wrestlers clad in loincloth and the subtle placement of Windsor Palace guards. The hypermasculine nation state and its coercive apparatus are revealed to be neither a product of postcolonial ingenuity nor divorced from an imagined precolonial past where men in akkhadas trained to defend the honour of the motherland. The calmness at display on the face of our charismatic figure comes from his vehicle being guarded on all sides by the same semi-clad men of akkhadas of yore but more insidiously, forming the outer ring are the men in camouflage carrying their automatic rifles. And then there is another, more insidious, reason why very little seems to perturb the man of power. The swarming of people, who jostle to get a glimpse of the charismatic leader, is not the eponymous “crowd” that animated the imagination of social historians – a collective encoded with a deep sense of moral politics and social justice. Instead, it’s a crowd subsumed and spat out by the commodity fetishism of the indoor spaces that Balak so meticulously constructs. It is a crowd that belongs to a nation in which patriotism demands sacrifice – an unyielding violence made manifest through the dismembered bodies on display as an indoor aesthetic. A crowd that only appears as a collective in Balak’s homosocial spaces in a moment of acquiescent consumption – the excesses on the meal table in “When We Last Touched” being just one instance.
Shatam Ray