The Mutable Aesthetic of New Mediatic Realism

Nancy Adajania engages with the new turn in contemporary Indian art and provides the socio-political and aesthetic contexts to critique its manoeuvres and developments.

- Nancy Adajania

Abir Karmakar. From my Photo Album - V. Oil on canvas. 48" x 72". 2005. O the artist. Image courtesy of Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke.

THIS ESSAY HAS BEEN TAKEN FROM VOLUME X, ISSUE IV, 2005. THE TURN TOWARDS REALISM.

I coined the term 'new mediatic realism' in the course of a recent essay to encompass the genre of painting that had arisen in India in response to historical changes in visuality provoked by televisual and cybernetic developments. All realisms are developed and judged in relation to, by comparison with, the paradigm of visuality that is most widely recognized as having captured the sense of the real in a particular society at a particular time. We have seen, over the last 160 years, how spectacular theatre, photography, the cinema and the Net have variously served as this dominant paradigm of visuality. My question, accordingly was this: are we witnessing, in contemporary Indian painting, the emergence of a new realism benchmarked against the media image? That is: since the index of reality now is the mediatic flow, do these media-informed paintings mark the front line of an altogether new take on the real?