copyright 2008 Nitin Mukul

I Woke Up Somewhere Else  - catalog essay by Alexander Keefe It is a hyphenated painting, a mosque-nest.  Light streams through the carved sandstone screen of a Mughal tomb, its geometrical symmetries twisted as though sucked in by the gravitational force of the dark, chambered wasps' nest that occupies the other side of the painting, the other side of the hyphen.  Nitin Mukul is an artist that works in provocative juxtapositions, between the biological and the social, the natural and the artificial, between an elusive sense of home and a shifting, overdetermined world.  The hyphen is the sign of the hybrid: neither term cancels the other out, neither disappears into silence.  They maintain, instead, a kind of dialogue, a testy balance that resists resolution into sham solidity, reduction into bogus self-identity.  Nitin Mukul's work negotiates the hyphenated spaces between geographies, visual cultures and identities "East" and "West."  He paints with the sensibility of a postcolonial transplant, combining pop cultural references from India's media-saturated visual environment with biological structures, ritual images and architecture.  New Delhi's urban landscape figures strongly in these paintings, a city where protean slippage is the norm: between the man-made and the natural, between the legal, semi-legal and illegal, between migrants and residents.  This stubborn civic resistance to enduring impositions of identity, order and classification spills over onto Mukul's canvases, where dense knots of jury-rigged electric cables sprawling out of a transformer box simultaneously evoke the clustered networks of arteries in a human body and the ad hoc informality of Delhi's explosive urban growth.  Mukul's hybrid use of oils, acrylics and washes of black tea picks up on these thematic interests, creating a complex, densely layered painted surface where materials mingle and confront each other from discrete historical and art historical positions.  Mukul's restless images pull in and out of focus, sharpening and withdrawing, excavating their way through the sediments of individual and urban history, mapping a migrant's passages across restless, unpredictable borderlands.  In "Mosque-Nest," the fish-eye angle of the spliced images, their not-quite-seamless suturing like a stitch across the painting's surface, and the dusty chiaroscuro that plays across their various architectures combine to create a strong pictorial effect, flattening the immense sky that looms behind the mosque's screen and the shadowed recesses of the hive in equal measure, drawing them into tense, evocative formal play.  Behind the surface there are pressures more urgent than the weight of the sky: the artist is making a point here about the dangerous powers attributed to Muslims in the contemporary imagination, the easy bleed between reductive frameworks for the characterization of social groups and the ways we imagine our pests as dangerous, unwanted non-human others.  The mosque-nest marks an intersection between biology, architecture, urban space and human history. Mukul draws inspiration here, as elsewhere, from the textures of urban life that surround him.  Delhi's architecture is as hyphenated as the painting's title, and just as hybrid:  wasps' nest hang from every tomb, every mosque and temple in an urban area that looked to its nineteenth-century visitors like a vast "necropolis," a city of the dead.  The decision to shift the capital of British India to Delhi from Calcutta in 1911 overlaid the old city's outskirts--then a patchwork of rural villages,  crumbling garden tombs and uncultivated wilds--with a rigidly modernist urban design befitting the new imperial city.  What resulted is a city where the rural is never far from the surface: nature intrudes relentlessly in Delhi--trees sprout from the sides of buildings, an overflowing water tank generates a miniature wetland, bats hide in the masonry--and so do history's contested traces.  Mukul engages with the palimpsest urban spaces of Delhi, where fifteenth-century tombs stand at the center of busy traffic roundabouts, their eaves cluttered with the nests of weaver birds, their dark interiors occupied by newly arrived migrants and stray animals, their exteriors jury-rigged with tarps and rope to create tiny shops and homes while the cars, trucks, tractors and autorickshaws circle around in a swirling cloud of noise, exhaust and metal.  There is a strong tendency evident in contemporary Indian painting to reduce this urban friction to postmodern pop pastiche and one-liner riffs; Mukul deftly avoids this pitfall by eschewing blingy, slick photo-surrealist juxtapositions and instead sticking to what he knows best: the tense, independent gravity that hides in the hyphen.  At a formal level, he plays his paintings' textured surfaces against their indexical effects, interrupting the seductions of simple representation and facile allegorizing with deep, mottled background washes and stains that pull at the viewer's gaze, softening and estranging the charged assemblies of objects within the frame.  At times the idiosyncratic technique generates a surface like that of an antique photograph, at times like a wall slowly molding away beneath a leaky drain.   The twinned images and juxtapositions in a painting like "Mosque-Nest" refuse to collapse into each other, remaining suspended and separate in the mottled, stained half-light that saturates both architectures.  They crumble where they meet and collide. Collisions are common in Delhi, where dense concentration and maximal use of space is the norm; the urban ecology of the city isn't one that allows for the maintenance of pristine boundaries between the natural and the manmade.  "Fountain" tells a story about water:  architecture and urban space disfigure and channel water, sucking it up through illegal booster pumps, selling it, hoarding it, spraying it out of nozzles in fantasy fountains that trumpet the power to waste in a time of scarcity, dribbling it out through a million leaks to pool, uselessly, in damp places on the sidewalk, on the street.  The city is a waste of water.  In "Fountain" we see a building disfigured, reflected in a puddle, its concrete angles swirling into eddies like faces in a funhouse mirror.  It is the prerogative of a painter to effect this sort of inversion: our vision of the city here is the product of pooled, wasted water.  In Mukul's paintings, this type of indexical play serves to foreground the act of seeing, the matrix of vision, where simple representation is simultaneously evoked and frustrated, left to fend for itself in a crowded, muddied field. Chance symmetries, happenstance resemblance, and unplanned encounters are the rule of the city.  In "Bomb Tomb" an image of a domed fifteenth-century mausoleum in Delhi's Hauz Khas neighborhood has been sampled, flipped and transfigured into a disco ball diptych that seems to emerge from a dusty, psychedelic sunset.  There is a radical oscillation in this painting between the medieval and the contemporary, between entirely different but--at least in Delhi, in this painting--overlapping aesthetic codes.  There is an electrical charge generated by this site of contact that runs through the painting's clouded sandstone swirl.  Visit that tomb in Hauz Khas at dusk and you will see another of the connective nerves that animate Mukul's twinned depiction: young lovers neck in the shadows of Delhi's ruins, escaping supervision, carving out a space for private desire amid the necropolis remains. Mukul brings with him to Delhi the eye of a visitor, a migrant but not a stranger; although born in the United States, he is what the Indian government calls an "Overseas Citizen of India" come "home," to a city that is at once a familiar theater for family memory and tradition, and at the same time an unknowable megalopolis, undergoing continual renewal and refashioning.  For "House of the Rising Sun," a show with Shelly Bahl at Delhi's India Habitat Centre in 2007, Mukul developed a series of images and a sound piece exploring the architecture and memory traces of his family's fading, colonial-era bungalow in Delhi's Civil Lines.  In the current show, he continues this type of inquiry, but expands it, turning his lens outward, onto the bewildering flux of the street.  The title of the show alludes to the sense of disorientation that occur when the boundary-posts of one's identity, one's sense of home, shift and change irresistibly.  "Minute Old Migrant" shows one such scene: the child's body seems to collapse into conformity with the hard angles of the walls, shadowed by birds in flight against a chemical blue sky.   When Mukul moved with his family from the United States to Delhi, he was in good company:  an estimated quarter million people migrate to Delhi every year, most of them from India's impoverished countryside.  While the flow of people into India's cities puts enormous pressure on scant resources, it also generates a complex, heterogeneous society where ancestral ties of caste, clan and region persist alongside--and sometimes cooperate with--the class-based stratification and economic inequalities sharpened by India's liberalizing economy.  Labor flows from the countryside to the city and back again, marshaled by wildcat labor contractors, summoned by nouveau riche on the hunt for domestic help, sought by young household servants looking for brides:  Delhi is a city defined as much by mobility and dislocation as it is by fixity and rootedness. We get a glimpse of what's been left behind in "The Myth of Upward Mobility in the Empire of Light."  There's a ramshackle shack beneath a sky crowded with towering silhouette shapes, fractured into stained glass geometries, its mist and clouds bleeding into tea-dark stains that hang and drift heavy in the evening air.  Someone has left a light on at the door, perhaps to guide home a tired traveler.  But is it a return or a rescue?  The shanty looks like it is about to buckle, to fall apart beneath the looming weight of the broken sky, its mundane blue dissolving in streams, loosened as though washed in acid.  The sense of nostalgia latent in this deceptively pastoral scene is undercut by the painting's retreat from reassuring representation, by its monstrous violations of scale.  Mukul shows us that even the countryside has somehow been reprocessed, reimagined, transformed by the same powerful traction that has brought the minute-old migrant to his bleak perch in the city.  The tiny house, dwarfed by the imposing shapes that rise up around it, hasn't moved, but the world around it has, and now it huddles beneath ghostly intimations of skyscrapers and megamalls etched into the vertical twilight sky. The most mysterious image in the exhibit is the large canvas "Rock for Light."  It is like looking into a cave, a prepared cave, lined with symmetrical rows of flickering ritual oil lamps that reach back dispelling the cavern's darkness and its amorphous contours in one stroke.  The air inside is charged with illuminated particles moving in dense clouds of color and light and smoke.  The stage is set for theophany:  obscurely twinned figures rotate in the center, following each other like a snake eating its own tail, like a diagram of perpetual motion.  The earliest architecture that survives from ancient South Asia is the cave.  At first glance this may seem like a contradiction in terms: the cave is a natural structure, not an artificial one, not really a form of architecture at all.  But caves in ancient India were transformed by human hands into dense monasteries of cells, stone temples and sculptural assemblies.  That this architecture coexisted with a less durable, wooden style of building is vouchsafed by features carved into the stone that mimic timber frames and ornaments; at this, the emergence of durable architecture in South Asia, we see a form that is at once both natural and man-made, where the representational possibilities of one medium are used to evoke the solutions reached by another.  The architectural cave represents a collaboration between man and nature, one shaped as much by ritual needs and collective visions of cosmic order as it is by individual intentions. Look more closely at the twinned figures rotating at the center:  Mukul has taken an image of a performer frozen in flight, diving off a stage.  The musician stands at an elevated remove from his frenzied audience, and then he jumps:  neither here nor there, he is poised for a moment in the air.  It is at once a gesture of radical individual freedom and deep social trust: a moment of transport that depends on a crowd of catchers, that instantly and improbably effaces the alienating distance between the performer and the audience, collapsing the estrangement between individual and social will.  It can end in exaltation or injury, or both.  Like the other paintings in "I woke up somewhere else," what we see here is a threshold moment, resonant and unresolved, allowed to remain that way. Alexander Keefe is an independent Delhi-based critic and writer.  He has written for Matters of Art, ART India magazine, and Nature Morte Gallery, and blogs at jugaadoo.blogspot.com.