Digvijay Nikam
Challenging the norms of fine art and pop culture, Thukral and Tagra is a Delhi-based contemporary art duo. Jiten Thukral, born in 1976 in Jalandhar, Punjab, did his BFA from Chandigarh Art College and MFA from New Delhi College of Art in the late 1990s while Sumir Tagra was born in 1979 in Delhi and did his BFA from New Delhi College of Art and a PG from National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.
Over the years they have had numerous exhibitions at various places including Arken Museum in Denmark, Kunstmuseum in Bochum, the sixth edition of the Asia Pacific Triennial and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. Thukral & Tagra have also received numerous awards and were recently singled out by Wallpaper Magazine as one of the 101 best emerging international designers.
Working in a manner reminiscent of the Chinese artist Xu Zhen, Thukral and Tagra have divisioned their work into diverse mediums and narratives. Employing the artistic methodologies of painting, gaming, archiving, sculptures, and publishing, their practice tries to deal with subjects like social and urban reality especially the concerns of the middle class of India, global consumer culture, and futurism. Simultaneously their work has also tried to engage in interpreting Indian mythological narratives and symbols as well as questioning the provenance of Indian identity and its plural articulations. For Thukral and Tagra, it is always their themes and ideas that have led to them to different mediums, and in turn encouraged them to experiment with different materials like terracotta, porcelain, wood, paper, and even the moving picture.
Courtesy: Thukral and Tagra.
Commingling science fiction and consumerism with a novel material – bottles, Thukral and Tagra created a 4.2 metres high sculpture titled Apocalyptron in 2010. Composed entirely of cast-resin bottles of various types of products, commonly found in supermarkets around the world the sculpture is modelled after one of the popular Japanese Transformer figures from comics and animated films, specifically the “Gundam” series. Each of these bottles are labelled with the artists’ tongue-in-cheek branding of “Bose-dk” (the transliteration of an Indian abusive term) which they also used in their other popular artworks.
Apocalyptron imagines a world where consumerism has gone berserk gargantuan, and monstrous, threatening to destroy human civilisation. The sculpture both celebrates and critiques the culture of consumerism.
The country in the recent years has witnessed immense efforts by the farming community to protest against their deplorable conditions given rising privatisation, overdue debts, and climate change. Thukral and Tagra created a game Weeping Farm (2022) where each player takes on the character of a woman farmer from across India for two farming cycles – or one year. Periodically, the player will earn a salary in attempts to keep their character out of debt while also being faced with circumstances that place them under financial strain. At the end of 40 minutes, the player with the highest amount of debt is out of the game – signalling how every 40 minutes, a farmer commits suicide.
Their recent works have shown an interest in ecology and climate change as a result of their engagement with their own family histories of migration and farming in the Indian state of Punjab. Their most recent exhibition Arboretum exhibited at Nature Morte, New Delhi is a testament to this. It starts with the question – ‘If a tree falls in the Metaverse, does it echo and shake the earth?’ Consisting of a series of photorealistic paintings of green foliage and flowers layered in with pixels and glitches, the exhibition presents an intriguing coming together of nature’s splendour with the digital world’s omnipresence. The shape of the canvases resembles that of the passing clouds and windows, a recurring element in their artistic language.
The work was prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic when the duo accumulated a photographic archive of trees, leaves, pixels, flowers and skies. These pictures which were primarily taken using their mobile phones necessitated the use of the photorealistic technique as Tagra says the technique is developed “in response to movements stemming from the ever-increasing and overwhelming abundance of photographic media.” Adding to it he notes how the works “look into the idea of consumption of nature in these times of newly found intimacies with technology. How our ways of consuming the environment, by clicking pictures, have become a part of the hourly experience.”
Thukral and Tagra’s artistic vision does not limit itself to the creation of artworks that the audience confronts in exhibitionary spaces of the gallery. In 2008 they established Foundation Thukral and Tagra in an effort to spread awareness and explore new innovative avenues to bring alive real-time issues to society by using a multi/interdisciplinary approach. For instance, through the use of communication design and produced commodities, they infiltrate multiple strata of society to enable conversations about socio-cultural issues of public health, mental & emotional health which are often fraught with conservative mindsets and taboos.
Attempting to break out of the mediated and disciplinary world, Thukral and Tagra’s visually appealing and thought-provoking works draw our attention to the multifaceted concerns of everyday life and that art needs to come out of gallery spaces to address and intervene in the lives of the audience.
References
- https://www.platform-mag.com/art/throwbackthursday-1412.html
- https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/art-and-culture/jiten-thukral-sumir-tagra-arboretum-latest-art-show-8404624/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thukral_%26_Tagra
- https://www.thukralandtagra.com/the-matter-within-new-contemporay-art-of-india/
