Surendran Nair | Cuckoonebulopolis: (Flora and) Fauna

About

The exhibition is a collection of paintings and drawings inspired by The Birds, a play by the Greek playwright Aristophanes. In the play, a man convinces birds to establish their new city in the clouds, later named Cloud Cuckoo Land, which translates to Cuckoonebulopis. At the heart of Nair’s work is the notion of this nebulous utopia – he reflects on the strange, ironic, and sometimes improbable possibilities that humans dream of when designing a utopia.

The cycle of works, Cuckoonebulopolis, has grown immensely since early 2000, when Nair first took on the project. He draws and paints his imagined actors from The Birds, dressed in elaborate costumes and masks, taking on the identity of various birds (flamingoes, owls, sparrows and pelicans, to name a few). His loose, long, and whimsical titles hint at his initially lighthearted and humorous approach; however, as he realized the nuances between the “cuckoo” birds and their utopia, Nair clarified their relationship to the clouds with his unique iconography, drawing from traditional performing arts, history and mythology, and the real and imaginary.

The works, however, are not in any way meant as arguments against or in favor of any particular manifestation of utopian desires. Nair’s interest in utopia stops at the very basic threshold, where and when it makes one compelled to imagine something other than what is already in existence. It is not the proposal for an alternative future that interests him, but the critical engagement with the present. This idea is then employed as a backdrop, a theatrical device, to sharpen the contours of Nair’s images whilst they are at play, to accentuate the tenor of whatever they may address.

As Mumbai-based poet, critic and curator Ranjit Hoskote has stated:

“Nair regards painting as no less interactive a medium than the installation or the digital interface: a coded yet inviting communication around which artist and viewer choreograph a productive dialogue. The act of painting is, for Nair, an offering of metaphors to his viewers: metaphors from which they can gauge the curve of the artist's imagination while also staging their own imaginative departures. Accordingly, the emphasis shifts between the artistic imagination and the viewerly one, from one painting to another. The artist indicates that some of his works are programmed in a relatively open-ended fashion; they function as scripts, around which viewers can improvise their own performances: some of Nair's paintings dedicated to the figure of the actor, such as I Beg Your Pardon: The Scorpion Act II - an actor meditating on a character of an imaginary play (Cuckoonebulopolis, 2002), function in this manner."