Bharat Sikka: “Space In-Between”
By Peter Nagy

"Space In-Between" is the title photographer Bharat Sikka has given to his on-going series of landscapes shot across India. The title can certainly represent the general state of the Indian psyche these days, with not only foreign influences coming into the country via globalization but also the increased inter-connectivity between different parts of India itself, through telecommunications and increased domestic travel. Sikka captures this rather abstract state of being in a purely visual mode, free of language and any cumbersome nomenclature.

Sikka's landscape photographs exploit an aesthetic of displacement, he covets indiscriminate voids more than known entities, prefers an atmospheric indecision over any demonstrative statements. His landscapes, though registered by place name, avoid recognizable landmarks and actually merge all places together to form a comfortably anonymous portrait of the sub-continental panorama. The characters in Sikka's dramas are buildings, grand and humble, engineered and jury-rigged, but they are always pushed to the sidelines, only leit-motifs of a larger mise-en-scene. How these pieces of the puzzle do or do not jive together is what fascinates this photographer. Residual spaces that hang in the balance and liminal zones that defy easy definitions are what Sikka's images forcefully articulate (with all subsequent irony well-intended).

Physical and mental spaces hang lugubriously in these pictures. The viewer finds him or herself in between the urban and the rural, the traditional and the contemporary, the well-heeled and the down-trodden, the international and the indigenous. This zone of anxiety may best represent India today, its economic and cultural successes to be found in the acceptance and ultimate exploitation of this anxiety, a comfort within uncertainty, a power within disquietude. Sikka eschews the exoticized backdrops of historical India (the forts, palaces, ghats and temples) that have been over-photographed and rendered mute in the process. Instead, he hears the voices of India's multitudes in the spaces they actually inhabit, spaces rarely experienced by anyone else.

While pursuing this rather elusive subject, the photographer has happened upon an equation of genres, which allows him an elastic freedom. These images are, of course, predominantly landscapes. But Sikka has devised an inclusivity that allows portraiture, still life and interiors to be relevant within his mix, serving his overall premise rather than any specific categorization. Sikka’s “Space In-Between” resides both in the mind and the eye, can be both experienced and imagined, and is relevant to both the personal and the wider body public.

[Peter Nagy is the director of Gallery Nature Morte in New Delhi.]