Festival Review
‘Par Excellence’
by
Buzz Burza
As an exhibiting photographer and someone who uses this wondrous medium to document various projects, I was happy when asked to comment about the photographic aspects of the just ended annual India International Centre’s Festival of the Arts. But then, as I spent the exhibition’s last day walking through the more than a dozen separate shows highlighting the Festival’s theme of The River, I realized the enormity of the task as well as the truly stupendous success of this group-showing of group shows.
With any group there are certain specific strengths unique to that group that, when the group is disbanded are lost forever. Anyone who missed seeing the hundreds of photographs that were on display missed out on a chance of a lifetime that will never be available again. For those fortunate to have seen even a portion of the photographs that were on display are blessed.
The one photograph that will forever ring like a bell in my mind is the noteworthy photograph by Sumant Barooah that I first saw as the show was being mounted in the long corridor outside Committee Room One. Although the overall theme of this year’s Festival was the Rivers of the World, this photograph was a Chinese streetscape. It is documentary in nature but, unlike the remarkable collection of archival work from Russia, Barooah’s photograph belongs to the spontaneous school where you have to be there, see it and capture it before it walks by. What he saw was a line of parked new automobiles on the left, a larger, sturdier bicycle rickshaw coming at you peddled by a larger sturdier man than one sees in Delhi and on the right snazzy new facades of shops that can be only Chinese. The couple on the right are both wearing jeans with the gent doffing a baseball cap. The lass on the left walking towards you has a large bag draped over her shoulder, was wearing a short skirt and tights and shod in what appeared to be knee high Native American moccasins. The people could be anywhere. The place could only be China. It was this juxtaposition of the old and the new that provided the photograph’s uniqueness.
The international aspect of this Festival was, to this child of the cold war, the truly important thing. The momentous installation of Sculptural Art that graced the ground floor of the Annexe effectively showed the Wonder of India that was, is and will be in large, almost life-sized photographs. The American Institute of Indian Studies organized this while the Russian photographs that completely filled Committee Room One were from the National Library of Russia. Add the photographs from China and the three main bases of the sad cold war are covered. This was a program that, in my youth in the United States of North America would have been an impossibile thing. The Festival’s universal scope more than meets the international mandate of the IIC. I humbly extend profound thanks to those responsible.
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