Frieze London 2021: A Brief Current

A Brief Current features a collection of recent artworks by leading Indian contemporary artists Rameshwar Broota, Atul Dodiya, Anju Dodiya, Sunil Gupta, Shilpa Gupta and Pritzker-prize winning architect B.V. Doshi, who come together to explore a cohort of physical and psychological experiences that are intensified by a motivated search for meaning, identity and expression in a complex cultural fabric. In a sense, the ambivalent artist–genius who is dissociated from the artwork, thereby stripping it of its emotional charges, is replaced by a concurrent figure whose self-awareness is entrenched in collective causes. In this presentation, Anju Dodiya’s often autobiographical mixed media works vivify the internal gaze as an emotionally theatrical yet consistent cornerstone from which to intimately experience the world; Shilpa Gupta’s installation of photographs sets out to challenge the restrictions on freedom, agency and mobility brought about by the naming of persons and identities, through the investigative compilation of individual testaments; Atul Dodiya’s oil on canvases are expressions of painterly freedom, seeking to frame a spiritual and mystical experience by willingly embracing liminality; Sunil Gupta’s photograph is an autobiographical revisitation of the illicit experiments with his sexuality in his childhood; Rameshwar Broota’s self-invented technique of erasure reveals an artist concerned with the inner journey of objects and people treated as microcosms of the universe; Faiza Butt’s discourse on the history of morality suggests the female experience is both universal and overlaid by an objectifying gaze that diminishes consent in how one is seen; and finally B.V. Doshi’s surrealist canvas is an artistic memoir that replaces the present with remnants of memories.