The bleak side of Indian city life

Visual Arts:  City Park at the Project and Pioneers at the Temple Bar Gallery, reviewed by Aidan Dunne.

City Park, The Project, Temple Bar until August 1st (01-8819613/4)

Pioneers, Dan Shipsides, Temple Bar Gallery until July 12th (01-6710073)

City Park, say its curators, "is conceived as an open space where different constituencies can come together", an exhibition in which the artists combine "aspects of the city with references to Indian and Western art history, film, nationalist politics, colonialism, and the new economy". It lives up to the outline, making the Project's foyer, Gallery and the Cube a relaxed, interconnected environment, within which is a range of accessible and stimulating work.

The show concentrates on artists active in and around the southern Indian city of Bangalore, where economic prosperity is based largely on IT and service industries, which, the curators argue, invites comparison with Dublin. Kiran Subbaiah makes caustic reference to the relentless hype of IT in his work, an affordable, functional multiple which people will not be queuing up to use. That is because it is a software-wrecking computer virus recorded on CD.

N. S. Harsha's site-specific paintings also offer a sardonic commentary on economic progress. He has made a series of very sensitively-painted figures sleeping on the floors throughout the gallery, a straight depiction of the way people routinely sleep out in public spaces in India, and a reminder that people also routinely sleep out in public spaces in Dublin.

Several artists adopt a quizzical attitude towards styles of representation. Pushpamala N. and Clare Arni have assembled a purpose-built photographic set, and costumes, to recreate a Europeanised 19th-century depiction of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. Between the portrait photographs, the set itself and informal documentary images of the process, you get a sense of how representations and aspects of cultural identity are substantially theatrical constructions.

There is, apparently, a finger missing from the Victoria Monument in Cubbon Park, and Ramesh Kalkur's over-painted photographs use this idea by ironically reinstating it, in ways that poke fun at the worthy solemnity of the monument. Kalkur's crowded, painted frieze of public statues in Bangalore, arranged above the reception desk, provides a good, mock-pompous introduction to the show.

Avinash Veeraraghavan's miscellany of uniform-format photographic prints, taken from cable television, convey the idea of an endless stream of repetitious, inconsequential visual stuff, though not in an especially novel or engaging way. In the Cube, Christoph Storz's monochrome, linear floor painting comes across as a kind of complex cosmological diagram. You instinctively start looking for constellations or other symbols, but in fact the patterning is derived not from the heavens, but from the complex mass of lighting gantries and other paraphernalia suspended from the ceiling above.

He refers to Rangoli drawings, made at the thresholds of their homes on a daily basis by many Indian women. Similarly, Sheela Gowda takes something quintessentially Indian and vernacular, the paste from which incense sticks are made, and makes of it something ambiguous, contemporary and abstract. Her curvilinear lines of burnt incense, laid across two stretchers, keep us guessing.

Valson Koorma Kolleri's suspended sculpture, fashioned from recycled scraps, suggests correspondences to organic networks or, indeed, cultural networks, in an agreeable, unforced way. Umesh Maddanahalli Shivanna explores the experiences of Indian emigrants making their way to Europe illegally. Overall, N.S. Harsha's paintings, modestly conceived and economically delivered, rather steal the show.

Dan Shipsides Pioneers is somewhere between documentation and art, leaning, perhaps, more towards the former. It consists of a series of large-format photographs of Irish crags, including Glendalough and Luggala in Co Wicklow. Onto the images, Shipsides has drawn the lines of specified rock climbing routes. The images are ruggedly beautiful, and the lines have a bit of magic about them, indicating as they do the hardest ways to get from A to B. There is something compellingly aspirational about these lines. They are also a graphic illustration of the inbuilt perversity of rock climbing as an activity, the quality that sets it apart from the conventional category of "sport". Shipsides accompanies each image with sections of recorded conversations with the pioneering climbers who put up these classic routes from the 1940s to the 1960s, including Frank Winder, Elizabeth Healy, Joss Lynam and Noel Brown.

Although these recollections are worthwhile, they tend to nudge the show towards the purely documentary. There is, perhaps, a parallel to be drawn between the refreshing attitude of Winder and his contemporaries to the mountains and climbing, and the way the great Joe Brown and his contemporaries were concurrently redefining standards and the class-profile of British climbing. Ship-sides's show is certainly interesting as social history, but those images, marked with lines of possibility, say everything necessary, and in a general, widely applicable way, without the need of commentary. Perhaps that commentary finds a better home in Source magazine, accompanying the images in the form of a CD.