Freedom of Expression is Dead in India Says Artist Anish Kapoor
Anish Kapoor. Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
October 7, 2022
“When I look at what my fellow artists are doing in (India), I see very little that dares to challenge. It seems that artists are afraid. Self-censorship seems to be the overwhelming attitude,” notes Anish Kapoor writing in The Art Newspaper, to mark 75 years of India’s independence from British rule. “In India today, freedom of expression is dead.”
Also, because of anti-Islamic feelings generated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his followers, “Indian classical music is now in deep crisis. Muslim classical musicians are cautious…Gone are the days of the famous musicians Ali Akbar Khan and Vilayat Khan, we are now in a time of tame fear.”
Kapoor, 68-years-old and based in London, is one of the most influential and popular sculptors today. His public works are adventures in form and feats of engineering. They include Sky Mirror, 2007, a reflective stainless steel dish nearly three stories tall, at the Rockefeller Center, New York; and the Ark Nova, 2013, the world's first inflatable concert hall in Japan.
Orbit, 2012, in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London, is made of 35,000 bolts and enough steel to make 265 double decker buses. Known as the ArcelorMittal Orbit., it offers 20 mile views of the London skyline. Luxembourg based ArcelorMittal provided the steel for Kapoor’s sculpture. This followed a conversation, between former London mayor Boris Johnson and Lakshmi Mittal, Executive Chairman of the global steel company, about building a landmark to commemorate the 2012 Olympics in the city. Mittal is among India’s richest with an estimated net worth of $14 billion, according to Forbes.
The Orbit, London, known as the ArcelorMittal Orbit, named after the steel company with Lakshmi Mittal as Executive Chairman
Cloud Gate, 2004, is 66 feet long and 33 feet high, a blob of 110 tons of stainless-steel, installed in the Millennium Park, Chicago, United States. The mirroring steel, called the bean by locals, “ attracts millions of visitors each year, no matter the season,” a reviewer in The Chicago Tribune noted.
“Using deep matte colors, reflectiveness and other illusions, (Kapoor) makes boundaries seem to disappear with an effect that is often overtly sensual and spiritual,” a reviewer in The New York Times noted.
Kapoor works on different scales with concave or convex mirrors whose reflections attract and swallow the viewer; PVC skins, stretched or deflated; and pigmented stone carvings. There are influences from ancient Indian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman sculptures as well as modern works.
He won the Turner Prize in 1991 and has a honorary fellowship from the Royal Institute of British Architecture, London, 2001, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford, 2014. He was awarded a Knighthood in 2013 for services to visual arts.
Kapoor studied at Hornsey College of Art, London, 1973–77, followed by postgraduate studies at Chelsea School of Art, London, 1977–78. He was born in Mumbai and attended the Doon School, a private boys’ residential school in Dehradun, India.
His father, a Punjabi Hindu, was a hydrographer and applied physicist who served in the Indian Navy; his mother was from a Baghdadi Jewish family in the city. In 1971, Kapoor moved to Israel with one of his two brothers, initially living on a kibbutz.
“Historically, India's multi-layered diversity has been its strength,” adds Kapoor in The Art Newspaper. Among the country’s 1.4 billion people, there are roughly 200 million Muslims, 100 million indigenous tribals, 30 million Christians, ten million buddhists and millions of Sikhs.
“It is no exaggeration to say that these diverse non-Hindu peoples are now second-class citizens in their own land.” This, writes Kapoor, is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Hindu Taliban.”
For access to stories each week, follow on: LINKEDIN or TWITTER or FACEBOOK
