Seriously playful

Link , one of the most arresting works on display at (In)Between, Alwar Balasubramaniam’s first show in two years, is a length of string that ends in a hook, suspended in mid-air. There are false walls and magnets at work here, but all you see is a hook reaching out, casting a shadow. Even if you aren’t an art connoisseur, it makes you stop, think, wonder. What is it that lies between those spaces? Is it a possibility unfulfilled? A frustrated desire, an ambition short of being actualized?

Big thinker: Balasubramaniam with elements from his work Kaayam at his Bangalore home. Hemant Mishra / Mint

Trying to explain Bala’s (this is how he is known) art might seem simplistic. Yet the viewer’s perception is important to Bala: For him, that is what closes the circuit, completes the process of art. “Artworks are a by-product,” says Bala, 39, in his attempt to find answers to the questions that have haunted him since boyhood.

Growing up in Chennai, the son of a cab driver and a homemaker, Bala began winning prizes in drawing competitions early on. A place in the local Government College of Art materialized only after three attempts, but the philosophical strain that had made him wonder, as a 12-year-old, whether a bird skimming across the sky changed the sky forever, carried him through: He spent those years working in a plastics factory, learning the basics of silk-screen printing—the foundation for his knowledge of printmaking.

Bala graduated in 1995, but he had already learnt his most important lesson: You didn’t need a bachelor’s in fine arts (BFA) degree to be an artist. “Rembrandt didn’t have an art degree,” he points out quite seriously. That awareness gave him the freedom to teach himself whatever his work demands, from printmaking and sculpture to what he thinks will be his newest medium: video art.