My country and other animals

Sixty diverse works of 31 artists grace the walls of San Francisco-based Asian Art Museum, one of the largest institutions devoted entirely for Asian art in the Western world, at its ongoing ‘Phantoms of Asia: Contemporary Awakens the Past’ exhibition. And of the 60, two are creations of Odia artist Jagannath Panda. Touted as one of the largest contemporary art exhibitions to date at the Museum, Phantoms of Asia showcases Panda’s  The Cult of Survival II (2012) and The Cult of Appearance III (2011).

While in Cult of Survival II, the artist symbolises endless cycles of consumption and production in the form of a snake crafted from pipes, acrylic, auto paint, fabric, and other materials, Cult of Appearance III is Panda’s attempt to juxtapose the past and the present. “The snake sculpture is an expression of danger of being addicted to the cycle of production and consumption in this rapidly changing consumeristic world. The entangled form of sewage pipes is a reflection of human condition where there is an instinct of survival, death and renewal of soul,” he says. Panda uses brocade fabrics to imitate the skin of the snake here and plastic yellow flowers and snails in fibreglass to signify life. Panda believes that his work is appreciated for its originality and the uniqueness with which it is presented. “I use animal figures to present modern-day India and the issues plaguing it. I mostly use fibreglass, plywood, metallic fabric and acrylic paints,” he says.

His Cult of Appearance III is a mixed media sculpture with two paintings, a three dimensional structure in the shape of a bird and varieties of patterned textiles and stickers. The three-piece large work is more like a layered collage where the artist mixes mythology and realism. “There are many layers in the sculpture through which I am trying to present the evolving nature of humanity vis-a-vis its problems,” he says.

The sculpture, on one end, has characters from the epic Ramayana with Hanuman’s army of monkeys laying a bridge for initiating war against demon king Ravana and at the other, migrants from Odisha and other smaller states engaged in building of a flyover in a metro. There are bits of under construction flyovers that stretch throughout the canvas.  “This is reminiscent of new cities built on ghost cities, whole civilizations layered on top of previous ones,” says the artist.

In the same canvas, he draws the victims of the 2011 floods in Bihar and Odisha and flying directly over them are aircrafts carrying flags of G-20 nations as if promising them aid. Besides the two paintings, there is a three-dimensional bird in one corner of a painting whose wings are made of thousands of stickers of luxury cars that our roads are replete with today. At the base of the canvas, there is a slice of the highway. “This work illustrates a city’s tensions in a modern day India, as overdevelopment threatens natural habitats and infrastructure collapse before they are completed. So while in one part of the creation, you have juxtaposition of civilisations, you have disaster in the other and development in the third,” he says, adding that the spectator is part of the cross road.

Born in Bhubaneswar in 1970, Panda received his BFA in sculpture from the B K College of Arts & Crafts, and MFA in sculpture from the MS University. Pursuit of higher studies took him to the Fukuoka University of Japan and the Royal College of Art in London, where he received Masters in Sculpture in 2002.