Making History at Digital Crossroads
You walk into a certain time that is omnipresent in the art-nouveau home of Jenny Bhatt, – a sprawling apartment in the Opera House neighbourhood of Bombay where she paints. Time that denotes historic junctures in the city’s economic history and its cultural visualscape. Bombay has always been mercantile and international, its business communities are urban but tied to each other through forms of family and religious life . From family and communal life we see forms informing cultural life. Jenny Bhatt is an artist emblematic of the flux the city experienced at the turn of the 21th century .
Growing up in a joint family that made its money in trade of asafoetida from Afghanistan to Burma she was witness to what the city entailed in its cosmopolitan make up, specifically Bombay’s urban Gujaratis who have a peculiar culture. They are conservative vegetarians who flock restaurants, the Chowpatty beach, dance away the Navratri, are liberal with nightlife, come from family businesses but are more recently pursuing independent careers in accountancy, medicine, curating and some turning out as artists. Gujarati Theatre is interconnected to poetry and humour and has seen visual representation as a subject in the works of Bombay’s most famous avant-garde painter Atul Dodiya. But humour is what makes the city sublime and liveable, more human than Delhi and us polite as a people who navigate a financial capital’s excesses and deficiencies of time. A couple of blocks from Jenny’s home is a restaurant on Marine Drive called ‘New Yorkers’ – here you get melted cheese tacos – something most Mumbaikars thought of as Mexican food in the 1990s. There is Kobe Sizzlers and an erstwhile nightclub called Copacabana — all elements of international culture swiftly indigenised to serve not only local palates but an economy that was slowly shedding socialism and protectionism. Jenny Bhatt is an artist of that time – her works are pop because they gather those moments, the people’s beliefs and sentiments in vivid colours – all fluorescent and contrasting .
She studied art within the applied arts at the Sophia Polytechnic on Peddar Road, a college run by nuns for girls. Here she was bored by her teachers’ attempts to inculcate her into boring runs of experiments in visual studies. She didn’t have to be taught to imagine but her exercises in painting fonts, her ability at painting ‘Times Roman’, the early needs of advertising gave her an arm-chest of visual tools that she could use in painting. Her work was good enough for her teachers to leave her alone to experiment. She would make portraits of famous artists such as Hussain, Raza or Souza in their representative styles, for example – Jehangir Sabavala’s portrait in the form of his landscapes. She would spend time reading up on Art History at school and at home borrowing her grandfather’s books. She left school to join Lowe Lintas where she understood what graphic design required of designers and realised while using their library which had an extensive library on art – that art was much more of her calling .
Leaving Advertising for art she began exhibiting on her own volition at the Museum Art Gallery, Kala Ghoda and other art spaces, she also became a keen observer of the practices of other artists. She found India in a flux where design had consciously wanted to erase the ‘Indian’ in it and find a visual echo in America but Indian designers refused to engage with that imaginary because they were not interested in investing time into understanding Western ethos or philosophies behind the design. She spent time at the School of Visual Arts in New York and returned to India amidst the Art Boom where she saw artists take positions in art that were superficial and comical . It is here she began making her animated series of Moksha Shots.
Moksha Shots were like energy shots or tequila shots that satiated one’s needs for salvation with ease and efficiency. Moksha has long committed requirements of detachment for one to find real eternal joy. Jenny believes it is unachievable in our present times so we can experience moksha by trading it in with what material experiences bring us momentary joy. For some it may be a car and for another it may be fame etc. She constituted a constellation of ‘Moksha Divinities ‘ comic characters who were drawn from real people. For example ‘ Moksha Bum’ is a deity that represents those very many who never end up doing anything as they are lazy but have ideas they await to implement. Jenny, who has always had a very serious disposition when explaining her works, for sure is taking the piss out of certain privileged sections of our society who were claiming to be global and contemporary but lived deeply confused lives in transitions of major economic changes, cultural attitudes and patterns of consumptions. ‘ Moksha Shots’ were to be distributed as short films precursor to NFTS, all the way back in 2009. She presently is making NFTS but by not making her paintings into tokens but rather making content for the format drawn from her practice.
If you see her ‘Cosmograms’, they are paintings that could draw from aesthetic cues of Indian Tantra Painting but also hold forms of digital media such as the ‘@’, the MAC – ‘Apple’ and other forms or fonts all ascending into swirling digital dopamine composed mind-maps . She makes Mindmaps of human want, of our memories and the visual echoes of what the imagination desires. Digital Dopamines mirror our incessant need to access forms of human imaginaries which are fantasies but available to us in the virtual form – Instagram reels and digital content to satiate what we don’t have and who we are not. Jenny Bhat uses elements of Augmented Reality to change the viewing of her two large canvases, where she projects animated movements bringing the static artworks to life . Jenny Bhatt’s experiments with technology are also drawn from ancient Indian inferences of human desire and illusions, how we are attached to our desires and enough so that we manifest them in material forms . Attachments to materiality are hindrances to our pursuit of happiness or Moksha, though Jenny reconfigures the path to moksha through dialectical materialism. This interplay with the virtual or the digital is also an artist’s social commentary on how real the interface emotionally exists in our human realities specially with the use of technologies such AR and holograms.
Jenny Bhatt’s solo exhibition ‘MokshaShots’ – Episode 21 and Digital Dopamine at Gallery Art & Soul is an amalgamation of brightly hued canvases and non-fungible tokens scattered into an exhibition which we can recall within the terms of art history as avant-garde, cutting-edge or contemporary . We could also term it as Digital Art or other terms that art writing offers us, her work could be seen in the lens of Pop-Art and be seen by me as representing the flux of my city – Bombay’s history but all those definitions and my attempts at explaining fall inadequate. For what she is doing with visual art today is what we have waited to see at the intersections of a world we are part of and a new realm that is to emerge with its own definitions when art and technology find points of convergence . She is making history.
Jenny Bhatt
