Liberalization and everyday change
The most striking part of the exhibition is ‘Soft Terrors’. Produced between 1992 and 1996, it is a series of collages that brought Rajan wider recognition. These small compositions are made using precise clippings from newspapers and magazines, assembled with a careful attention to detail.
“Here the collage becomes the work of a surgeon who makes precise cuts that pierce the surface of ideology and habit,” the curator writes. These works reflect a rapidly changing India of the 1990s – a time when the country’s economy was opening up, but which also brought a consumerist culture, a flood of global brands, media expansion and different aesthetic choices – and its subsequent imprint on the imagination of the Indian middle class. In 1991, India underwent major economic reforms, often referred to as ‘economic liberalisation’.
Thus, the works reflect changing aspirations. The collages bring together fragments of this changing visual culture—advertisements, “aimed at a growing middle class,” sit next to scenes of work; cut-outs of pills and capsules are placed in landscape scenes; an Indian airline seems set against what appears to be a European environment.
