Sudarshan Shetty art installations are macabre, magical and unmissable
The shrieking wail of a sarangi calls out to you long before you have entered the newly-opened Gallery SKE in Connaught Place. Before you have climbed the short flight of stairs to the gallery, you can hear the rapid taans of some classical raga being played with an unerring hand on the quintessential Indian bow instrument said to be capable of producing a hundred shades of the human voice-the sau rangi. And then, over these nostalgic notes, comes the sound of an electric drill climactically ending with the crash of china smashing to smithereens.
You have just experienced a Sudarshan Shetty work subliminally even before you have encountered it in person.
As the critic and curator Gayatri Sinha says, "Shetty resists any marks of identity in his art... there is no signature style, no signature use of material. But his work is recognised by the way it packs in universal opposites, life and death, desire and entropy, aspiration and disgust. This is the non-dualism of philosophy, and among Indian artists, no one understands this as well as Shetty."
If non-dualism, or Advaita, is the hallmark of Shetty's art, then death and passing juuxtaposed with recreation and regeneration are recurring themes in his works. His piece de resistance in this show is the video work 'Waiting for Others to Arrive'. In it, the idea of passing is dealt with in multiple ways-through a colonial-era building waiting to be demolished and rebuilt on one hand and, on the other, overlaying of it with a musician playing classical ragas on a sarangi. Both the instrument and its music being endangered by time as much as the old building about to be razed and rebuilt.