Women, Objects and the Memory of Sculpture

 

(My Sitting Laundry by Sojwal Samant)

Saturday. NFCC. New Friends Colony Community Centre. Espace Gallery. The glass wall reflects the pub across the road. I train my eyes and make sure that there is a show inside. Bahadur, the faithful multi-role man of the gallery, whom I have known for the last three decades, is at his post. He receives me with a familiar smile and goes to switch on the lights. With the lights on, Sculpting Lineages: Women Across Generations, a group show of sculptures and sculptural installations, comes into existence.

Curated by Nainvi Vora and designed by the veteran exhibition designer Prima Kurien, the show is impressive, with works by Ira Chowdhury, a ceramist who seems to have seen centuries, the way Louise Bourgeois had seen centuries through her works, and those by Latika Katt. Ira Chowdhury's ceramics are subtle, emanating the old-world charm of Greco-Roman vases. Her works started and ended like a haiku in this exhibition.

Peering at the viewers with his sad eyes, a bust of Tagore emerges from the dark wall. Beside him, in a niche, one could see the bust of Mahatma Gandhi, his eyes closed in prayer—or do they show a sense of resignation? Both are by Latika Katt, an artist who offended one and all with her haughty attitude (because she had artistic talent and thought that each time she was sidestepped, it resulted in a permanent irritation). Though done at disparate times, she imbued them with a sense of loss and pain, befitting the mood of the century in which they walked the earth.

My Sitting Laundry may be a very ordinary title for a sculpture, but when Sojwal Samant places four pieces of ceramic that imitate clothes on two levels, the assemblage becomes the portrait of an ordinary woman as a subject worth portraying and an object denied her levitative rights. Using recognizable and unfamiliar forms, Samant creates an ensemble of sculptural installations, provoking viewers to eke out meanings from them. An abstract figure trying to break out from a broken ceramic surface leaves room for considered interpretations.

Sambhavi is a senior artist with an established language, using scaled-up objects to create sculptural bodies. At the same time, the perforations in them create an added dimension to the work, along with the shadow and the space around it. Scaled-up images of a palm-leaf fan with extended handles transform the sculpture into a surreal object, the way C. K. Rajan has done in his works.

Remembering an artist's name is difficult these days, as there are many artists, not only in galleries but also on social media, flooding real and virtual spaces with innumerable works and their images. I believe that if a work is outstanding, naturally the artist's name gets etched into the viewer's memory. This is exactly what happened with the works of Radhika Agarwala and Pooja Gupta.

Radhika Agarwala plays with images of 'nature' and the 'natural'—bark, roots, and so on—in order to create her works. Each object that we encounter in life has a story, and these objects in turn generate memories in our minds. The concept explored by both Agarwala and Gupta is the relationship between object and memory. It is not Barthes-ian; they are not ridden with cultural memories but with very subjective ones. However, personal memories can evoke empathy and identification. I thought that after Shilpa Gupta, there is another Gupta on the scene who could make her mark further with her tablet-strip sculptural installations in various mediums.

One good thing about this exhibition is that, even if it does not trace direct lineages from Ira Chowdhury to Radhika and Pooja, viewers can recognize the curatorial intention of highlighting feminine ways of sculpting (if sculpting is seen as a male forte) and their ability to address the intimate as well as the larger issues of our times. These works in the exhibition have a 'personality' of their own. It is a good thing that Prima Kurien has not darkened the space more than required.

JohnyML