Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow With Sudarshan Shetty

The Prolific Multi-media Artist Chats With Hello! About His Extraordinary Journey. Here’s an Alchemist Who Believes His Roots Constantly Engage With Modern Inspiration to Create Startling, Ever-new Visual Totems
 

- Sangeeta Wadhwani

Just back from the India Art Fair in the capital, Sudarshan Shetty found himself, just two evenings later, rubbing shoulders with Mumbai’s arteratti at Maker Maxity, Bandra Kurla Complex. The show was titled, Reel Lives, in deference to the fact that Maker Maxity had a history as a Drive In theatre. His work, commissioned just for these grounds, was a recreation of movie projectors used in the era of the Drive In theatre; the late 70s. As we capture Shetty by his installation, The Dream Box Project, we can’t help but listen to the work whispering: how easily does yesterday’s redundant technology become today’s art? Will today’s digital gizmos be also mounted as relics of nostalgia, five decades hence?

The theme of the show, we learn, was derived from property developer and art collector Manish Maker’s wish to honour the history of this area. The young scion, who technically is the prince of these parts, pops in to say HELLO! to Sudarshan, and we see a warm comeraderie between the young real estate gun and Shetty. The perfect union of patron and artist, one possibly in his 30s, one in his 50s, but both united in their understanding that a city’s past – no matter how whorish and rushed; a city’s past must be honoured.

We meet a day or two after the opening night of this exhibition, (which also features a photo exhibition called Travelling Cinemas by Amit Maheshiya, and an installation by Susanne Roottenbacher), to discover that like his works, Sudarshan Shetty is unfussy, honest; a totally unembellished personality.

We can see him as the common citizen hopping in and out of the no-door BEST bus, which itself says something about the ragtag nature of Mumbai’s survive-it-all denizens. Shetty was one of them.