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 (referencing 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. As he explains, "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 and large painting from this series, is set in "…the imperial tent of Shah Jehan: an ornate, bejewelled and baroque version of the austere yurt that his Turki and Mongol ancestors would have set up on the Asian steppelands. A boar stands inside it. It could be Varaha, the sublime god Vishnu in his world-saving avatar as the Cosmic Boar. But from the viewpoint og Islamic hygiene, the animal could simply represent an unclean pig, whose presence violates the camp of the Defender of the Faith. 'The Parable of the Swine' demands that the viewer politicise himself - not by taking one side or another in the game of brutalising illusions that is communitarian politics, but by seeing sharply through the manipulations of rival ideologies, by retaining the right to shuttle among contradictory explanations" (Ranjit Hoskote, "The Openness of Secrecy: Soliloquy and Conversation in the Art of Surendran Nair", Itinerant Mythologies: Surendran Nair, Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 2008, p. 17).

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