Call it a strange coincidence; Dan Brown’s ‘The Lost Symbol’ and Gallery BMB’s ‘Dark Science of Five Continents’ released/opened during the same month, with a few days between them. Before getting into the symbology of affinities (between them), as a curator-critic myself, I should be saying ‘Dark Science of Five Continents’ belongs to Shaheen Merali, the curator who has ‘re-invented’ the ‘artist-critic’ in this show. Quite a difficult proposition it is to call an artist a ‘critic’ (of anything) especially when it has been proved theoretically that ‘criticism’ and ‘critique’ have almost become impossibilities in our contemporary world. If I go by Dan Brown, no artist is an artist unless he forwards a critique in his work (No secret is a secret if it is not destined to be revealed). Reclaiming the ‘artist-critic’ from the landslide of hedge fund driven market is a major (curatorial) effort, though the curatorial claims have to be analyzed vis-à-vis the works of art.
     Dragging Dan Brown into the context of ‘Dark Science of Five Continents’ is a deliberate act from my side as I find both ‘The Lost Symbol’ and ‘Dark Science’ more or less treat the same subject; the conjectural mysticism embedded in scientific rationalism, its aesthetic meanderings through secret ridden symbolism, its encrypted truths and the terrorizing ways through which the truth is protected and even extracted.
     Shaheen Merali’s curatorial efforts during the new millennium have always addressed the potency of truth and terror and the agencies that embody this potency, especially after the Post 9/11 world scenario. Dark Sciences of Five Continents could be translated into Dark Science of All Continents or more cryptically into ‘Dark Sciences of Mankind’ for what we see in this show is a set of disjointed symbols that wait for the secret ‘keys’ (keywords, passwords or even in Shaheen’s own terms, the intervention of the ‘universal intellectual’ as against the Foucauldian ‘Specific intellectual’) to find their ‘lost’ counterparts so that a new meaning could be read out of them. Viewer with a ‘search’ mode on has to position himself as a universal intellectual in order to ‘read’ this show out and to reach that moment of apocalypse (NOT the day of death but the day of REVELATION) where he suddenly understands his share in the acts of truths and definitely in the acts of terror.
     Chances are abundant to misread the works of the six artists namely Chapman Brothers (Jake and Dinos Chapman), Riyas Komu, Tunga, George Osodi, John Kessler and Wang Quingsong as the curatorial premise goads the viewer to look out for the artist-critic in each work. However, like the members of secret societies, these artists subvert the readerly position by providing potently distracting symbols and statements. This subversion eventually throws the viewer out of his assumed innocence/victim-hood and makes him to see how much he is a part of the acts of terror played out amongst the various ideological layers of a complicated society that camouflages the panopticon and pyramidic structures embedded in it with the quotidian philosophies.
     The mutual subversion (in certain sense, a deliberate and playful distraction) causes nothing but the birth of a self-critique, which could explicate the role of ‘artist-critic’ or ‘reader/viewer-critic’ in the production-dissemination-consumption chain of aesthetical objects. I would like to quote Jake Chapman’s words: “One of the standard measurements of artistic legitimacy is the idea that an artist is almost the subject of a psychoanalytic examination. The audience, as analyst, tries to discriminate whether this person is canny, or whether their traumas are authentic. There is nothing worse than analyzing someone who is actually aware of the conditions of analysis, because it means their illness isn’t trustworthy.” THERE IS NOTHING WORSE THAN ANALYLSING SOMEONE WHO IS ACTUALLY AWARE OF THE CONDITIONS OF ANALYSIS- that explains the mutual subversion of artist and the viewer/reader.
     Hence, there is a stalemate situation and in this interface of mutualities one finds the ‘code’ to unlock the dark sciences that the Chapman Brothers try to contain in their works. ‘Someone Offered Money to Do it’, ‘I Wanted to Hurt an Enemy II’, ‘I Wanted to Impress Friends’ (all painted bronze sculptures) and the etchings reveal a world of torture and terror and the human beings’ ultimate desire to be a part of it. These are machines in a sense, objectified to stillness, muted to frozen lamentations and above all codified to suppressed laughter. The spectacle of torture, its erotic thrills and the severe adrenaline pumping while witnessing torture (as an agent or as a victim) et al come to be revealed in these works. The ejaculative hammering on potential brains does not come from the ideological higher-ups, but they are nurtured and performed within the human beings themselves, the Chapmans seem to say. The spectacle of hanging, the desire for cannibalizing, the desire to defeat, succeed and flaunt- all coming from the snapshots of recent history take a sculptural form in ‘I Wanted to Impress Friends’. The criticism cannot be directed elsewhere other than to the self.
     Dark Science cannot escape the alluring charm of Dada- its ability for improvisation using dismembering as a method. The auto-erotic incisions on the word and the world, and the indiscreet acoustics of masturbatory manipulations and its cruel capacity to push someone to awareness by unlatching the floodgates of memory, Dada-ism had achieved a status of a Dark God (Moloch/Malakh) in the pantheon of visual art movements. But Dada cannot happen without the affect. One has to pose a victim in order to dismember his own victor’s status. There is a bit of romanticism in it- living in an imaginary/imagined past, which gives the artist a special right for exercising his dark science of cannibalizing.
     ‘Ballad of the Distracted Vs Cult of the Dead and Memory Loss’ by Riyas Komu comes from this imagined affect. He dismembers his migratory status, which is no longer applicable in empirical terms, and finds an objective counter part in a cannibalized Fiat Taxi engine, which is placed on a demonic platform encoded with the identifiable symbols from his previous oeuvre. A touch here would produce a mourning sound- Dada. The eroticism of putrefaction, hoisted on the altar of aesthetic veneration helps both the artist-critic and viewer-critic to move away from the given and turn it into a self-critique. The uncanny resemblance between the Chapmans’ works and that of Riyas has something to do with their similar approach to contemporary political history- not as a point of departure for critical harangue but as field of contradictions, which only a secret affinity for spectacular rotting can provide.
     American artist John Kessler also takes the Dada route, which he acknowledges considerably in his dialogue, when he presents his ‘Swan’ series. For him Post 9/11 world is a world where everyone has this creepy feeling of being watched even if they are not in to the ken of surveillance cameras. One lives with a collective guilt of surviving. Under the glamorous facades, the human beings hide a dungeon where all the vitriolic acts are cooked up, performed and enjoyed. Technology is not the medium of torture but a medium that could proliferate the CONCEPTs of torture, the images of it and the beauty of it. Ephemeral, airy, brittle, so kinetic- one could say many qualifying words for Kessler’s works. But they open a door with a flight of stairs leading down to the dungeon, which is called the human mind.
     Goerge Osodi, perhaps sticks out mainly because he does not approach a particular subject with an intention to dismember and splurge on the cannibalistic pleasures. However, the Nigerian artist’s works go perfectly with the curatorial theme, ‘Dark Science’. With a photojournalist’s verve and objectivity Osodi bares the innards of his own country, which is literally cannibalized by the imperial and domestic oil tycoons. Osodi’s pictures have an uncanny parallel between Goya’s famous painting, ‘Saturn Devouring his Own Children’. Interestingly, in the catalogue, we see a picture of the curator, Shaheen Merali standing against an out of focus backdrop of an artist/curator’s studio with book of Francisco Goya’s works titled ‘The Disasters of War’. Dark Science is not just a normative cause and effect structure but a cautiously created chain of events with demonic results. Artist-critic, Viewer-critic, Curator-critic devouring their own issues! Ironic it is but alas it is an inescapable reality especially when we see Osodi’s works in conjunction with a statement made by Dinos Chapman: “But to imagine that art’s got any other relationship than hand-in-glove with capitalism is stupid. It’s the cherry on the cake of capitalism. It’s pure excess value.” Osodi’s works become unintentional cannibalizing of his own ‘issues’ as the critique against capitalism turns a ‘cherry on the cake of capitalism.’ (Very old, fatigued but still charming argument, isn’t it?)
     Capitalism and its spectacular ways of turning people into cannibals using the distorted versions of alchemy come to play a major role in the making of the Chinese artist, Wang Quingsong. The artist counters the spectacle of ideological and organized torture (torture of the body as well as that of mind using two different methods; of aggression and of persuasion) using the same imageries of self-torture (self critique). In his video titled ‘Iron Man’ he enacts a willing victim by receiving fist blows from invisible persons till he bleeds like hell. At the breaking point (a moment before the human abilities of endurance break down eventually), the blows end and his face blooms into a weird smile. Dark science of aggression countered with the Dark science of self torturing- read it consuming, receiving and desiring. Why I cannot forget the videos of Marina Abromovic/Ulay and Paul Macarthy when I see the videos of Wang Quingsong? Or why I cannot shed the images of Ravi Aggarwal and Rameshwar Broota when I see the works of Osodi? Is it simply an art historical problem or the awareness that despite the geographical disjointedness, contemporary artists share some sort of spiritual communion while witnessing the rituals of dark sciences across the world?
      PS: I am not able to write about Tunga’s works. Perhaps, I am dumb. When I was reading through the interviews and CV section, I found Riyas Komu’s section quite interesting. His interview with Ullekh NP is interesting because it moves around his work Mr.Panopticon, which he did for the ‘Expressions at Tihar’ (2009). In his CV, he has written that he participated in ‘Tihar Show Delhi, 2009’. I became curious. He has mentioned the curators’ names in all the other shows. But not in this one. Then he makes a statement: “…the state policy to kill can stretch from execution, also by a firing squad, or to life imprisonment or even to exterminate brilliant minds..But it is not always possible in full measure. The ‘Prison Notebooks’ that were smuggled out of Gramsci’s cell prove that it is still possible in a large scale and can be catastrophic. And it continues to happen.’
And it continues to happen in Riyas’ CV too.
I am sure the Robert Langdons of art history, even after hundred years would come and decipher this encrypted code.
‘You can run but you can’t hide’- Down Presser Man- Peter Tosh.
‘You can fool some people sometime, but you can’t fool all the people all the time’- Get Up Stand Up- Bob Marley.

    SHAME IS GLOBAL IN ITS SENSE OF THE self, the moral failure of all the groups, in which we are member- including entire human race—shame reflect on each person individuality. In fact, shame is one of the family of self conscious emotions that include embarrassment, guilt, disgrace, and humiliation. 
    Can such powerful, yet negative feeling which plays an important part in our lives be cultivated to form a galvanizing force for a moral action against the violence and atrocities that characterize the world we live in? And can we generate some sense of shame through the works of art to join in, as the curator Shaheen Merali puts it, “questioning similar apprehensions and to further comprehend how, why and by whose premise, the planet’s resources and civilities are rapidly ‘diminishing’.” 
    A further query, and possibly a more important one, is to question why the majority of humanity continuously remains in a position of stasis: actors in an open prison, economically shackled and clasping meager morsels gathered from increasingly nomadic lifestyles.” 
Merali’s new show in Mumbai called The Dark Science of five continents’ comprising six artists from various parts of the world elicits a strange sense of shame. He keeps his tone of ‘shame experienced’ in his curating note and announces that his curatin effort is a ‘return of artist–critic torrent, focusing firmly on ethical commentary’ and admits the loss of respect ensued for the artist and the art world. The loss of respect has arisen out of ‘art fund’ fanaticism, he mentions. 
     The Dark Science opened a new space in city, the Gallery BMB. This may be the first kind of a space where art collectors Avanti Birla, Dia Mehta and artist/curator Bose Krishnamachari have joined hands in the business of art. The exhibition showcases works of Jake & Dinos Chapman, Jon Kessler, Riyas Komu, George Osodi, Tunga and Wang Quingsong. 
Jon Kessler has derived from the Dada strategy, and has taken images from popular woman magazines, made cuts in them to reconfigure their shape and image. The viewer is expected to add and complete the image as he approaches the picture a surveillance camera captures the composite image on a screen. 
He says ‘it’s a sort of riff on the line from movie Jerry Maguire, ‘you complete me’. He calls them swans, referring to the fashion, commodity, and celebrity culture. 
     Riyas Komu’s work uses variety of materials and is strongly rooted in his earlier works and images, it portrays a complex version of shame and guilt that is experienced by the CONCEPT of the notion of an ‘outsider’ in the city of Mumbai. His outsider is a taxi driver of this metropolis. He has used an elaborately deformed old Fiat taxi engine mounted on carved wooden platform, has given a switch in the hands of viewer to start the machine, that produces scratchy sound of some injured beast. 
     George Osodi’s photographs of Nigerian oil fields landscape and people examine the economic realities of everyday life. They stage a theatrical canvas of how oil actually becomes a commodity, the effect of economic stagnation, environmental degradation, and political jingoism. One of his pictures called ‘Christmas Tree 2’ is poetically constructed visual lyric where the black, greasy, oily and phantasmatic oil well machinery stands vividly like a powerful muscular male image, on the background of a woman in traditional attire and blurred greenery of mangroves, looking at it with an awe and a pale smile. The oiled hands, oil cans waiting to be smuggled out, the bare feet with white sand and a background oil storage tanks, and every other details, their distorted angles and dimentions induce a kind of embarrassment in viewer’s mind. 
     Wang Qingsong’s two videos and one C print titled Poisonous Spider are quite melodramatic works and least complicated. Their simplicity is their quality. However, sometimes they cannot be ignored as a shallow strategy employed to generate a kind of repulsive and violent shame. His works witness and imitate hopes and frustrations of Chinese masses. Each work narrates a story and each story is about a genuine insult of humanity. 
     In case of Tunga, again the imagery is simple. yet, he constructs his sculptures on the images of cadavers and carcasses, turns and twists them, or allows their floating mass to weigh on you, touch you. In his words, ‘from the light of mental urine comes the colour to exfoliate the amber, dissolving the sap and the the insects while keeping the wings and the golden flight within the visible space’. The empty remains of an insect, are its wings. 
     The most spectacular works of the show are the painted bronze sculptures and etchings watercoloured from the various series of Jake & Dinos Chapman. Simon Baker had quoted Bataille’s ‘freaks of nature’ while writing on Chapman brothers. He writes. ‘In one way or another, in one period or another mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monstors’. And yet , it is precisely this indifference to the deformities produced by men (as opposed to nature) that unsettles Goya’s Disaster of Warand threatens likewise to taint the Chapman’s returns to the same ground. It is position assigned to the audience, whose refusal to remain ‘indifferent’ undoes the moral knot. Just because they don’t care, doesn’t mean they don’t understand. 
“For Bataille it is precisely the pleasure taken,” Baker explains, “in looking that draws art into a perverse relationship with cruelty. Images of torture may be intended to repel, but works of art eschew an equivalent position of moral judgment. When horror is subject to the transfiguration of an authentic art, it is a pleasure, an intense pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless, that is at stake.” Bataille had described Goya as taking ‘sudden leap into humour’; this leap is difficult, where horror transforms into humour. It only evokes something similar to seeing ourselves, not through the prism of our actions, but through the prism of how others would see us in terms of our features or actions. It’s the shame, that involves a judgment of value about what we think others should think about who we are, given how we have conducted ourselves. 
Morgan, in his book on shame, has written about the documentary called Ghosts of Rawanda and the film Night & Fog, and has quoted Primo Levi and his ‘drowned and saved’ confession of shame that reflects guilt, disgrace, and humiliation of one who survived Auschwitz. 
     The new space BMB, and the curator Merali have been successful in injecting a sense of shame against an array of human atrocities, that are genocidal in character and scope, brutalities, violence, and systemic annihilation that mark our recent past as a human history.