Important Notice

In their bizarre combinations of the personal and the historical, the religious and the irreverent, Surendran Nair’s arresting images transport viewers to new, fantastical dimensions. From such neutral vantage points, viewers may look back on the framework, contexts and situations that shape their notions of identity, both individual and collective, and reality, learning more about themselves and their worlds in the process.

In... In their bizarre combinations of the personal and the historical, the religious and the irreverent, Surendran Nair’s arresting images transport viewers to new, fantastical dimensions. From such neutral vantage points, viewers may look back on the framework, contexts and situations that shape their notions of identity, both individual and collective, and reality, learning more about themselves and their worlds in the process.

In Nair’s ongoing suite of works, titled Cuckoonebulopolis (the ideal cloud world between heaven and earth that Aristophanes imagined in his satire, Birds), the artist draws on his abundant global archive of historical, religious, mythological, literary, political and artistic facts, practices and traditions to explore the idea of utopia: a place where one might escape all that is base in this world. As he understands it, the tumultuous relationship between the ideal and the real sets the perfect ground for his socio-political commentary.

In the present lot, part of this suite of works, Nair draws inspiration from both a trip he made to the Serengeti National Park in East Africa, and from Roberto Calasso’s novel, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, in which the author upends and recasts classical Greek myths and legends in an effort to connect them with contemporary life. As the artist explains, this work “…is somewhat inspired by Roberto Calasso’s retelling of the Nemesis myth in his book. According to him, Zeus tried to seduce Nemesis and she in turn tried to escape his advances by transforming herself into different creatures. Zeus did do the same thing and got the better of her, in the form of a swan. It also reminded me of the myth of Prajapati pursuing Ushas, his daughter and the creation of the animal kingdom” (adapted from an email exchange with the artist, November 2010).

Dominating the frame is the curious yet striking image of hybrid animal, with the head of a wildebeest, the curved horns of a gazelle, the torso of a zebra and the legs and tail of a cheetah. Standing tall against the stark Serengeti landscape, this strange, composite creature challenges viewers to question and complicate the ‘absolutes’ of reality, rather than accept them as they are presented. In particular, Nair urges an interrogation of those origin myths that are currently being offered around by various social and religious factions to create false histories and forge communal identities.

As Ranjit Hoskote explains, Nair is “…preoccupied with the manner in which powerful fictions can move the minds of millions of people: as artist and as citizen he has watched as spurious gospels of historical wrong-doing and necessary vengeance have turned, by repetition, into incontestable histories, myths that sustain hatred and destroy harmony. He has often asked himself how he can retrieve lost, often deliberately suppressed aspects of a shared history at a time when influential sectarian distortionists have claimed the privilege of interpreting the past…Wrestling with these questions, he has kept the door of versionality open, in defiance of absolutists, insisting on the validity of his fictive accounts of plausible pasts and possible futures, his subversive approaches to myth and history. Unlike the copyist or translator of archaic texts, Nair adopts a poetics of lila, of play, of sport among appearances and realities; in the open-ended lexicon of images that he compiles as he goes along, the inherited and the innovated are difficult to tell apart as they mutate and develop varied connections with one another, like the fragments of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope” (“The Openness of Secrecy: Soliloquy and Conversation in the Art of Surendran Nair”, Itinerant Mythologies: Surendran Nair, Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 2008, p. 15, 16).

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