Art & Sculpture At AIFACS

After visiting the M.F. Husain exhibition at DAG, I was walking towards the Central Secretariat Metro station when I saw the AIFACS building at Rafi Marg crossing, and old memories came flooding back.

Let me take a look, I thought, hoping to check the building that I used to visit regularly during the 1970s, when I was studying medicine in Delhi. In those days, the first floor of AIFACS had the British library and I had some very happy memories of hours spent there, looking at and choosing the books I wanted to read.

My first impression from the outside was that the building looked a little deserted, as if few people visited it, while I remembered it as an active space with people going in and out all the time. I asked a guard near the entrance and he explained the reason - the British library is no longer located in this building, it had shifted to Kasturba Gandhi road.

There were some exhibitions going on in the AIFACS galleries and I quickly visited a few of them. Here is a brief update about this visit (the image above has a wonderful sculpture by Aatish Khobragade).

The Lama in the AIFACS Foyer

The first thing that I noticed was that the AIFACS foyer has a new statue. It seems like that of a Buddhist lama. There is no plaque near the statue about the person. I asked about it but no one seemed to be sure about who he was. One of the guards said that it was a previous Dalai Lama.

I think that it can be the statue of the 19th Kushok Bakula Rinpoche (Ngawang Lobzang Thupstan Chognor,), who was sent to Mongolia as the Indian ambassador during the 1990s, when the country had come out of Soviet influence. I had seen one of his statues in a Buddhist monastery in Ulaan Baatar, and I thought that this statue looked like him. For Mongolians and Russian Buddhist he is seen as a very important religious figure.

I hope that someone from AIFACS (or any one else for that matter) can confirm about it - please tell me in the comments below.

Shekhar Ranjan Dutta & His Mythological Art

This was a solo exhibition on the ground floor of AIFACS, presenting the mythological paintings and some sculptures by the artist Shekhar Ranjan Dutta from Cooch Bihar in West Bengal. His paintings were on huge canvasses with a predominance of yellows, browns and reds.

His works reminded me of the stories I used to read in Chandamama, a Hindi magazine, when I was a child. The mythologies of Hinduism are complex and often ambiguous, and I would have liked to ask him how he depicted his paintings which respect those complexities. However, he was busy showing around some persons (in the image below) and I was in a hurry, so it was not possible to talk to him.

Sculptures and Art in the AIFACS Basement

An international exhibition called Nakshatra, was going on in the basement of AIFACS on that day, including some artists from Poland. I did not visit the main room of this exhibition and only briefly spoke to two Indian artists who were presenting their works in that exhibition.

The first was Rekha Soni who had a couple of water-colour paintings in the exhibition (image above). The second artist was Suzain Khan from Varanasi, who had some of her photographs in the exhibition (image below).

Unfortunately, I didn't have much time to actually talk to them to learn more about their artistic journeys. I quickly went around in the central part of the basement, which was showing some sculptures. There were some sculptures there, which I liked.

Among the sculptures, there were 2 works of Surendra Kumar which I liked - Emerging Whispers (above) and Shades of Silence (below). Both these works were in plaster-of-Paris. Surendra Kumar is from New Delhi and is a multi-disciplinary artist - he also had a bansuri performance at the inauguration of Nakshatra exhibition.

I also liked the acrylic on canvas painting by Jyotsna Sharma titled Nature (image below).

However, my favourite artwork in the Nakshatra exhibition, among the ones I was able to see, was a quirky and scintillating sculpture made of aluminium mugs painted purple (the first image at the top of this post) by the Mumbai-based artist Aatish Khobragade - it seemed so full of joy.

Conclusions

I came out of AIFACS feeling a little sad because in my memories, there were hours spent in that building with friends, many of whom are no longer alive. I had little memories of the art galleries below, my memories were mainly about the British library on the first floor.

My hurried visit to the exhibitions consoled me, while I remembered Salman Rushdee's words about imaginary homelands that we carry in our hearts - the old towns, buildings and homes that continue to exist only in our memories.

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