Jehangir Jani's show, Fairie Tales...A Relook, explores how society has used myths and fairy tales to dictate and restrain the human personality. He also attempts to place these age-old tales where they belong in the now. "We always start these stories by saying `Once upon a time...'. But they are here and now, and not elsewhere. That is just a way of putting a safe distance," he says. And that way, ignoring the truth that mythology is actually fact posing as fiction and is just as overpowering today as it was down the ages. So, his clay and sheet metal sculptures talk about the pain of people who don't fit inside the harsh unbending armour of social roles dictated by mythology. In NU'S boat, based on Noah' Ark, which is essentially a myth about reproduction, Jani asks, "But what about the single people. Were they all left to die?"Jani's figures are tormented by society's rigid adherence to the concept of masculinity and machismo, which allows for no alternate interpretation. "Genderbehaviour and biological birth of gender are two different things," he says, talking about the excessive social conditioning that humans are subject too. Words of insult flung on those who don't subscribe to designated roles figure prominently in the titles of his works like NAKED FLOWERS/Pansies, CHakka, CHakka, CHakka, CHakka, CHakka, CHakka and SISSY/phus's swing. The latter has a torso with half a head attached to the swing's chains with clay objects, representing the phallic, on the seat. "The myth of Sisyphus is of a man who is cursed to roll a heavy rock up the hill just to have it roll down back, for all eternity. And the swing symbolises the state of being in limbo," he says. A sense of being strung halfway between two states which is what `sissy' is meant to imply.
Though this is his first exhibition of sculptures, this theme ran through his paintings also. A self-taught artists, Jani, 43, gave up a management career in his late 30s for art. He moved to clay becausehe wanted immediate and direct contact with the medium.
Also, his chosen materials represented the conflict of individual desires against societal pressure. "I have faced off organic properties of clay with rigid metal," he says. The hardness of metal to him is like the external circumstances which cannot be changed. And the clay, though not tough and overtly physical as metal, is the soul which can never be hammered into shape, "the free part of our own".
At the Jehangir Art Gallery, Kala Ghoda. Till September 29, 1998. Time: 11.00 am to 7.00 pm.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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