The universe as home

Gulam Mohammed Sheikh's retrospective art show weaves a labyrinth of history and realism, showcasing iconic figures and cultural syncretism.

When you look at Gulam Mohammed Sheikh’s Speaking Tree with figures amongst the leaves and the two weeping Mother Mary figures ,   a retrospective of his works held at Lalit Kala Akademi in Delhi in 2011 come rushing back. The current show, Of Worlds Within Worlds, A Retrospective, curated by Robin Karode, is like a labyrinth of art history woven through the magic of realism, through doors of a master’s love for time past brought forward to time present.

“The narrative for me was a personal web of destinies and journeys, where I wanted to spread out a continuous thread of times and places; I wanted to gather a world found in momentary glimpses but embedded in deeper recesses. I always thirsted for an  investigation of more than a thousand sensory instincts homing around personal experience. In confronting the totally personal and the entire, I found the consonance of  many worlds,” he says.

One of his most seminal works in this brilliantly designed show is the melding of two universal paragons of virtue and sanctity — St Francis of Assisi and Sant Kabir Das. “Every time I am lost, either it is Kabir or Gandhi or Saint Francis. They did something with their lives that keeps them relevant even today. In that sense, coalescing at different times is part of my makeup. It is not I who discovered this. All of us realize that we constantly move from one time into another. That is why our way of looking at the world, our way of looking at life is somewhat different from a place where there is little history,” says Gulam Mohammed.

Art is perhaps the only territory that has kept hope alive as it isabout moving forward. Creativity never dies. Creativity looks forward, produces the future of hope. “I keep creativity alive by recalling the best from life or reflecting upon inspiring icons from the past who keep humanity alive. We know they were surrounded by violence – Rumi was surrounded by violence, Kabir and St Francis, too. They are harbingers of hope, they  kept the human voice alive,” says the artist.

Another epic work is his Ark. Set adrift on turbulent waters, with waves threatening to sink it at any moment, the ark speaks “of the covenant of wisdom and the refuge in the world that both seem utterly unattainable”.  The form of the ark draws upon 18th-century master miniaturist Nainsukh’s A Boat Adrift on a River: Illustration to a Folk Legend (c. 1765 - 1775). On one end of the boat sits poet and Sufi mystic Kabir.

Also in the series Kahat Kabir, which Sheikh started in 1996, he invites the human gaze into integral aspects of Indian tradition. Kabir is a compassionate kindred voice that speaks as part of a vital tradition in Indian philosophy and poetry.

The Ark is filled with characters that induce a flashback of history and iconographic images referencing Indian, Western, and Oriental traditions, including the goddess Kali, a group of Eastern mystics, a temple, and Srinagar’s Hazratbal shrine. Collectively, the elements alludeto Sheikh’s sustained interest in cross-cultural syncretism in Indian culture.