GURGAON - Contemporary art from the subcontinent is a reflection of the socio-political realities - the political conflict, repression and gender imbalance - prevalent in the countries as can be seen in the works of artists from Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka at an exhibition here.

Three video, installation and relay drawing projects are being held at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, one of the country’s biggest private museums of modern and contemporary art. The show will be on till Nov 1.

Leading Bangladeshi painter and performance artist, 40-year-old Mahbahur Rahman uses his body, popular Bangladeshi literature and the bovine (cow) species to convey the increasing Talibanisation of Bangladeshi society and the looming threat of returning to military rule.

“Cow, oxes and bovine slaughter pre-occupy me because they symbolise so many things in the Bangladesh like repression of women, exploitation of the poor and the struggle for freedom,” Rahman told IANS.

In his performance art project - ‘Transformation’ - a series of five photographs - Rahman performs an interpretation of a popular Bangladeshi play, “Nurul Diner Sara Jibon (The Whole Life of Nurul Din)” by writer Syed Shamsul Haq on beach in Chittagong. He wears giant buffalo horns and a coconut coir mesh.

“Nurul Din was a poor indigo farmer during the British rule in Bengal, when Indigo cultivators were being tortured by the British agents and local landlords. One day, he takes his his young son to till the Indigo field, where he works.

“Since Nurul has no oxes to till the land - because of the landlords’ meanness- he tells his son to hold the ploughshare while he becomes the human ox to drag it down the field. Weak and hungry, Nurul collapses under the weight of the ploughshare. His son watches in horror as Nurul slowly metamorphoses into an ox and moos in agony in a rather Kafkaesque (Franz Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’) manner,” Rahman explains.

The photographs, shot by his wife, fellow artist Lipi, show Rahman collapsing under the weight of the giant horns in the surf.

In his rather eerie installation-cum-video project, ‘Toys Are Watching Toys,’ Rahman uses the seated figures of 20 burqa-clad Bangladeshi women watching a nikah-cum-wedding ceremony of a couple in progress against a projection of a cow being slaughtered.

The masked women - made of black cloth, wood and paper - are dead and look like “ghosts in a funeral”. The bride in black is offset by the bloody black cow being butchered.

“Women in Bangladesh are usually uncertain about their fate after marriage. They are fattened and beautified like slaughter house cows to be sacrificed at the altar,” Rahman said.

Rahman, the founder of Bangladesh’s biggest contemporary arts initiative, Britto Arts Trust, is one of the few artists in the country who lives on art alone.

“The rest all have jobs to support themselves because market has not yet made inroads into Bangladeshi art,” he said.

Bangalore-based artist L.N. Tallur, known for his new age installations, speaks of “social chains and repression of human freedom across Asia” in his interactive project, ‘The Souvenir Maker’ in which viewers are invited to operate a barbed wire making machine to create souvenirs of golden barbed wires stored in glass milk cans- marked ‘Designed in America, conceptualised in India, Made in China and Sponsored by Korea’.

Contemporary Sri Lankan artists Muhammed Cader, Chandragupta Thenuwara, Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan and Jagat Weeasinghe document the civil war, people’s unrest, social disintegration in Sri Lanka in a relay drawing project featuring 100 sketches, ‘The One-Year Drawing Project’, between 2005-2007.

“The One Year Drawing Project is one of the most significant art projects to have emerged from Sri Lanka in the recent past. The project seemed to find a way of surmounting the turmoil and civil unrest in the country through its process - that of artists mailing works to each other and allowing each artist to articulate their visual vocabulary over a period of time,” co-owner of the gallery Anupam Poddar, one of the country’s top collectors of contemporary art, told IANS.

“Given the foundation’s engagement with the subcontinent, we were extremely keen on bringing this project to Indian audiences,” Poddar said.

The projects are an extension of the India Art Summit.