Event 2 Blog Assignment | The Fowler Museum

Event 2 Blog Assignment | The Fowler Museum

In a recent trip that I made to the Fowler Museum on UCLA's campus, I had the pleasure of visiting the Delhi-based Sahmat Collective: a visual display of arts hailing from India that the Fowler is showcasing between April through early August. 

After reading through a few of the summaries on the walls of the gallery, I learned that since 1989 this Collective has given artists, writers, poets, musicians, and actors in India a platform to artistically express themselves and promote pieces that surround artistic freedom: the gallery itself is a celebration of secular and egalitarian values. After scanning the pieces in the gallery once more after learning the background, it surprised me that the entire exhibit remained religion-free, especially for a culture so rich in deities as India, and focused solely on art for social activism and change's sake.

In context to the disciplines of our course, the exhibit merged the concepts of contemporary visual arts from India across a variety of media from over sixty artists with older, though still innovative technologies such as the motorized rickshaw, which caught my attention the most (below).

 

The section of the exhibit that showcased this rickshaw detailed its use in 1992 as part of a campaign across Delhi which featured rickshaw drivers banding together to paint on slogans that spread messages for commucal harmony across the city. 

I found it clever that this piece of technology, used for transportation and functional purposes in India to this day, could be designed artistically with a purpose for sending a message in a similar vein as an advertisement, but with a more rallying cry.

The exhibit was also keen on turning the old rickshaw into a more technology-friendly installation by attaching a television screen inside the rickshaw, which played a slideshow of different slogans from rickshaws all throughout the peace movement of 1992. 

Overall, I thought that this section of the exhibit did a great job of merging technology, not in the digital sense, but in the manufacturing sense, into an art that is meant to uplift a community. From there, the collective took an adaptive step further and made the art piece more readily understandable in relation to the digital media and helped the viewer engage with all of the different slogans though only one rickshaw was physically present in the room. In this way, the piece was able to paint a holistic experience of the different rickshaw art-slogans via the screen inside the vehicle, while not dismissing the physicality of the experience by keeping a physical rickshaw on display as well and merging the two together. 

The messages from some of the different rickshaws that were painted in 1992 were also shared below. These were the different messages found on the digital slideshow installed in the rickshaw.

Alongside the physical vehicle was a wall of different pictures again showcasing a multitude of slogans (below). 

To me, the exhibit really represented the idea of art as something that can be a mobile message. It also tied into themes from earlier in the course surrounding the idea of manufactured and replicable art - art that can be mass-produced. In regards to this exhibit, the piece was essentially taking messages and painting them over and over again. However, I think that this reproduction made the art more powerful rather than cheapened it, which is different than I wrote about in my blog a few weeks ago.

Overall the exhibit was an enjoyable experience. I got to see how art and technology could be merged together with a very political and cultural fusion. It was great to experience such contemporary pieces coming from such a different part of the world.

I would recommend the exhibit to those interested in global arts and culture, specifically with an interest in India itself, as all of the art will revolve around that specific culture. Definitely worth a visit, especially as it is free and on the UCLA campus!

Below are a few other enjoyable photographs of "art on the move" in India, as well as a snapshot of me and some peers at the exhibit!