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Exhibition review of Zamin: Homelands’, “Of Separation and Belonging: Sayed Haider Raza”, TAKE on Art. Books, Memory Issue 28, 2022

‘Zamin: Homelands’ at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation (JNAF), Mumbai celebrates the birth anniversary of Sayed Haider Raza and the centenary year of the CSMVS (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya) museum that timely coincides with seventy fve years of the country’s independence. It is now more than ever that in the times of mass displacement and migratory movements the question of home or pluralities of co-existence needs to be reconsidered. In this advanced globalised world with ease of travel, cheap airlines, constant travel and issues of homelessness there is a constant strife to come to terms with one’s identity. The show compels us to recall the timelines of our history that draw trajectories to artist’s life and happenings, and social realities of the times. It also makes us think of separation and belonging in a sensitive new era of the aftereffects of partitions. With a few works from the museum, other collections in the city, and archival material from the Raza Foundation the show is curated by Puja Vaish, Director of the JNAF, and ran from 2 June–31 July 2022. The show incorporates texts that are informative, touching anecdotes using letters— written and received—and notes written in Devanagari, French, and English tell of the artist’s assimilation of languages, and varied knowledge of art, literature, poetry and cultures.

Raza was born and raised in a small town in Madhya Pradesh where his father was a forest ranger. His experiences and memories of growing up close to nature and the environment later churned into his incessant brushstroke and dripping in the 70s. The exhibition’s title is taken from a 1971 oil on canvas painting titled Zamina phenomenal gestural work— beams of yellow, orangish red, and green screams from behind the aggregating black fuid that barely cohere of imagery in our eye. While in France during 1960s and 70s, Raza revisited the forest landscapes in India bringing defning compilations from remembered residues of his mind. Almost notating the mild conversations heard from a distance or fery fames visible in the middle of the night.

During 1948–55, Raza turned dramatically lyrical watercolours on paper to paradigms in landscapes— works such as Houses with Medieval Church, Church at Meulen, Mosque being good examples. These works trace diversities in rectilinear views and feature structures drawn from an aerial vantage in the delightful diagonal brushwork. With blocks and broken lines on ochre and brownish grey ground or sky- these architectural constructs sometimes are a dense mass of black, unsubstantial structures, cubist contours or tin-like translucent flatness of burnt sienna, grey and ochres that occupy the blazing ground but, with no specifics of time and place. Scenes in graphite where Raza indefinitely erases and draws (leaving the lines visible than removing them with an eraser), where lines multiply to construct. A few contours define the wall, roof and depth of the structures that hint at the window or door – a pictorial frame looks cohesive as a picture but hardly situates one location in the viewer’s mind. Traced in a scene, Untitled (1952) gouache on paper has a burnt sienna sphere that looms large between the disproportionate structures suspended in cosmic space—it appears like twin cities were split, while they share a sun or a moon telling a mythical tale of light and darkness. As we move through the exhibition, a black dot (we imagine we know so much about it, yet we struggle with its presence) is cosmically framed in the middle of a square, moving, forwarding (in its entirety always) across the plane. Raza’s late works develop many forms of this dot— from an orb in a landscape to a circle, mass, or sun, embedded amid a tile-like mosaic which at times relocates across the plane. The show culminates with a work titled Amar Kantak (1998) with verso text that reads, ‘Amarkantak, Mandala, Kakaiya, Dindori, Niwas, Satpuda, Vindhyachal, Narmada, Narsinghpur… my thoughts and life forces are driven by these (places). Eternal memories. In gratitude to my homeland – Raza.’ Names of these places variously suggest sites of pilgrimage, where mountains collide, rivers meet, and saints had resided. If not human-like, the dot emanates a humanising effect on us as we constantly follow its path in the exhibition. The artist moved away from pictorial constructions in the mid-1950s to experiment with the forms of abstractions—rising from substantial, tangible traces of buildings to attain a full circle to culminate in symbol, motif, geometry which is predictable of a matured seeker in a person. In the show, the artist’s most prodigious works are of the 70s—where he revisits memories in most discomforting brush strokes—in fleeting blobs and dashes across the canvas. The artist’s experiences of nature and land emanate in colours and emotions that echoe his calling in loss and longing for his homeland.

Zamin: Homelands’, Curated by Puja Vaish, Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, Mumbai, 2 June–31 July 2022.

sometimes a family is a gradeschool empath, 2 dogs, his tired mom and her chaotic good mastermind girlfriend, his tired dad, a local senator who is now a plant, an illegally procured android who used to be his grandma’s coworker who is now his florist grandpa’s husband, an immortal butch lesbian and her once-dead (now cyborg) wife, a magic crow from 90′s chernobyl, the kid's recovering alcoholic uncle and his villainous motorcycle boyfriend, and a cosmic polar bear named Jeff.