Important Notice

A keen observer of identity and sociopolitical change, Surendran Nair draws his images from the vast archive of historical, religious, mythological, literary, political and artistic facts, practices and traditions that he maintains. The artist’s provocative canvases often link unrelated elements from these annals to push the limits of his viewers’ notions of identity, community and reality.

In Nair’s ongoing suite of works, titled... A keen observer of identity and sociopolitical change, Surendran Nair draws his images from the vast archive of historical, religious, mythological, literary, political and artistic facts, practices and traditions that he maintains. The artist’s provocative canvases often link unrelated elements from these annals to push the limits of his viewers’ notions of identity, community and reality.

In Nair’s ongoing suite of works, titled Cuckoonebulopolis (referencing the ideal world between heaven and earth that Aristophanes imagined in his satire, Birds), the artist explores the idea of utopia, a place where one might escape all that is base in this world. Speaking about this series, Nair “Though the basic premise of imagining a utopia fascinates me, in the sense that it is a craving for a better world and thus a critique of the times…I use the idea of a utopia as a backdrop, a theatrical device to sharpen the contours of my images; the inner terrain they carry within and the outer, which they find themselves in, as well as to accentuate the tenor of whatever they address…” (as quoted in The Bad Behaviour of Singularities, Sakshi Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2006, not paginated).

The present lot, an early painting from Nair’s Cuckoonebulopolis series, draws the viewer’s attention simultaneously to the idea and the impossibility of a life of isolation in contemporary social contexts. Like most of the artist’s protagonists, each ‘swan-man’ in this large-format painting stands in isolation, in a sort of limbo between belonging and alienation. It is this vulnerable state that Nair uses to focus the viewer’s attention on the fluid definition of identity as well as the sociopolitical forces that it is subject to, and often at risk of violence from.

As Ranjit Hoskote explains, “Nair populates his paintings with a cast of enigmatic figures that meld the authorial viewpoint with strange, unsettling, sublime or tragic alterities…The swan-man…is an oblique self-image on which the artist has mapped an identification with such marginal persons as members of minorities who possess nominal citizenship of the Republic but do not enjoy any real citizenship rights in an increasingly majoritarian-dominant public sphere. Some hybrids are dynamised by the miscegenation that has brought them forth; others merely stand for intermediate, indefinite states of being. I suggest that the swan-man is not a masterfully dual personality so much as he is a figure trapped in mid-transformation – seemingly neither fully here nor quite there” (“The Openness of Secrecy: Soliloquy and Conversation in the Art of Surendran Nair”, Itinerant Mythologies: Surendran Nair, Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 2008, p. 11).

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