Activist art in the age of terror

NEW DELHI: In the age of terror, how can art stay aloof? This week, a ���blood-spattered' painting has become the highlight of an exhibition of Indian contemporary visual art at a leading London art gallery. Titled the `Rape of India', it is M F Husain's response to the Mumbai terror attacks.

"I am a painter. I can express anger only through my art,'' said the 93-year-old Husain. The artist, who is currently living in exile abroad, painted his view of the brutalization of Mumbai on 27/11, while the city was still under siege.

Art has always helped contextualize violence and its repercussions, adding another dimension to the great tragedies of our time. Pablo Picasso's Guernica expressed his disgust for war and went on to become a potent anti-war symbol. Goya's famous series of horrifically violent etchings, `Los Desastres de la Guerra', was inspired by the brutal French occupation of Spain.

Indian artists too have segued, via art, into the issues that confront the country today. One of them is terrorism. Contemporary artist T V Santhosh's work, `Tracing An Ancient Error', showed Mumbai battling one of its darkest nights in July 2006 when a series of seven bombs ripped through peak-hour suburban commuter trains and killed hundreds.

Santhosh, a Mumbaikar, says he was deeply affected by these events and his horror was reflected on canvas. In `Error', he turned a photographic image of the event into its negative, eliminating specific details to allow the subject to appear in grander scale.

"Over the last five to six years, war and terror and its political implications have been a recurrent theme of my work,'' says Santhosh. The reasons aren't hard to find. "Artist are activists in their own way. They just use a visual language to express their thoughts and emotions,'' he says.

That emotion is wordlessly transmitted to those who see the painting and can help a whole society heal. Raw emotion was what Maithili Parekh, deputy director at auction house Sotheby's, felt when she saw Husains ���Rape of India' at the Serpentine on Friday. "As a resident of Mumbai and one who was in the Taj Mahal Palace hotel when terrorists struck, I could feel the emotion and passion of Husain's work. It's also aptly named because that's how I felt - as if India had been raped.