Translation is a connective mode of engagement that is productive rather than prescriptive. As producers of visual and textual translations, the artist and the writer are equally indebted to a meeting with the original. In my case, the original is the work of the artist, whereas for Rajan it is the world around him. My words are both a translation of Benjamin�s invoked at the outset of this passage and of what I see in Rajan�s work. The visual nuances of his drawings express a poetic cadence that allegorizes the contradictions of social circumstance. I find the play on the corporeal-the social body-the body of humanity-the dismembered texts that float through the images most provocative. Their �not this-not that� quality resonates both within and without the work. These images carry with them many layers of meaning and serve not as expressions of truth, but rather of possibility. The quiet strength of Rajan�s work lies in its ambiguous pauses and ironic quotations. Indeed, ambiguity and irony carries through to the title of the exhibition �Little Black Drawings,� and though these drawings may be dark studies of humanity, they are neither diminutive nor black. As generative sites of engagement, we bear witness to them. We question their meaning. We talk. We translate these works into our own experience with the world as it unfolds around us.
Kathleen Wyma is currently the Project Coordinator of the South Asia Film Archives at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, where she is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History. Her dissertation addresses the shifts in artistic practice and art historical discourse in India in the period between 1960 and 1990. She is a past recipient of a fellowship from the ShastriIndo-Canadian Institute for research in India in 2002-2003 where she was affiliated with the Department of Art History and Aesthetics at the M. S. University in Baroda.
1.Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York : Harcourt, 1968) :79 |
