THE LAST BRAHMIN Shailesh BR
14 Feb - 20 Oct 2020 | Villa Arson, Nice
Machine à prières
Une machine pour répondre aux questions philosophiques et existentielles (fort utile en ces temps troublés) ? C’est la démarche de l’artiste indien Shailesh BR (né en 1986), qui détourne les objets afin de faire surgir un sens critique. Ainsi de cette drôle de Machine à Puja ou Machine à prières qui répète le rituel du brahmane de façon mécanique, annihilant du même
fait tout pouvoir de connexion spirituelle normalement assorti à cette pratique. On se prête à sourire mais le sujet est grave à l’heure où le nationalisme hindou fait rage et le système des castes, brahmanes tout en haut, persiste en Inde. L’artiste nous invite à entrer dans son exposition qui reconstitue la maison du dernier brahmane, lieu normalement interdit. Par cette ouverture, Shailesh BR tente de décoder son histoire personnelle imbriquée dans les problématiques religieuses, politiques et sociales de son pays. Une prise de position délicate permise par l’art.
Between autobiography and novel, the exhibition hall prefigures a narrative of starry form where the confluences and detours of modernity and tradition are formulated in the context of today’s Indian society. The path designed by Shailesh BR can be conceived as a project of understanding about this gap between the present and the past, the east and the west and this «last Brahman» that he summons, it is also a part of ourselves. At the top of the social and religious pyramid, this Brahman, like the untouchable he cannot rub shoulders with, is condemned to the determination of his caste. This continual present, free from all rupture and progress, condemns man to submit to his heredity and to a social destiny. From traditional art to today’s art, forms of representation are always also the mirror of conflict. The Indian artist settles down in a space that he invests physically but also in the very time of the exhibition and its duration. A present of life responds to the eternity of a present. And indefinitely from a beginning or a cause, he proposes a state of things as a metaphor for a simple meditation on the state of the world. The space is then mapped according to a path where the ritual is combined with the traces of modernity.
Kinetic sculptures combine traditional machines and ingredients, such as candle paraffin or saffron pigments, curry and all the clues attached to the symbols of India. The exhibition is contemplated in the opening of this space, the microcosm of which may be to be seen in the multitude of yellow paraffin lotus flowers. Every room on the wall or on the floor contains an always community anecdote without the individual ever having control over his own life. The evidence abounds, the materiality of traditional objects collides with machines that desire nothing. The conflict is hidden, it is not formulated and the artist traces a path between spirituality and freedom in a sometimes implacable and painful process. Each piece presented distilles both a dust of the world and the totality of it. Each proclaims a rejection of any segregation and the whole invokes the necessity of conversation and exchange. Beyond its subtlety, the work of Shailesh BR spreads its radiance in a place that responds to its strangeness. But here no one is a stranger, neither in a caste nor in a nation. Art also serves to gather.
