(Artist, Megha Joshi)
September 2012. Pragati Maidan, New Delhi. United Art Fair
was on at Hall number 12, which has become defunct now. I was the chief curator
of the project which had gained a popular acronym, UAF. Artists from all over
India came to Delhi; some artists came because they were participating in the
mega project. Many other artists made it a point to visit the UAF because they
thought that it was their Fair which would grow into one of the historical art
fairs in the world. Things did not work out the way I had wanted despite my
claim that I could help ‘cross the desert without a camel’ (that was the title
of one of the articles that appeared in a mainstream daily); obviously, the
desert in question was the art market and camel was the art galleries and
middle(wo)men.
(Object by Megha Joshi)
Just outside the magnificent hall of exhibition (where world
expos were held annually) there was a conspicuous structure made out of
discarded rubber slippers painted in gold; a shrine that we often see in the small
towns in North India, but here without an idol inside it. Artists and visitors
were paying a serious visit to the small shrine and were returning with a
hesitant smile for they could not make out whether the humble structure was a
spoof or a serious work of art. It was many years before two young guys spoofed
the fashionable conceptual installations by placing a pair of specs on the
floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2016) and seriously photographing
it. Here in Delhi, however the Shrine of Slippers meant some serious business
for the artist behind that impermanent piece of art was Megha Joshi, a then
little known artist based in Delhi. She would go on to become one of the vocal
feminist artists in India in the coming years.
(Works by Megha Joshi)
Megha Joshi studied art at the Fine Arts Faculty, MS
University, Baroda. The art market of mid 1990s did not have much to offer a
young practicing artist. So after education Megha (I prefer to use her first
name in this article) went to Delhi where she was born and brought up and decided
to join the television/entertainment industry as an art director. Many artists
who took up jobs in other fields than art teaching went into oblivion only to
resurface during the art boom that threw palpable money around by 2005. Megha
had not left art altogether but was hesitant to make a reentry till she met
Mukesh Panika of the Religare Art, who had come back from the US and taken up
the top job in the cash rich establishment. For Panika, with the famous Eicher
Building at the outer circle of the historical Connaught Place at the heart New
Delhi at his disposal, sky was the limit. He initiated a project called ‘Connaught
Place/Why not Place’ exploring the urban histories and contemporary stories.
(Torso QED by Megha Joshi)
Considering it as a launch-pad Megha came back to the art
scene and the Shrine of Chappal was a defiant art/act emanated from her
rebellious self which she unapologetically presented at the UAF, even giving
some surprise to me, the chief curator. Megha surprised the art scene of Delhi
once again, perhaps capturing the attention of the media and the connoisseurs
alike in 2013. I was curating a show titled ‘R.A.P.E’ (pronounced ‘rape’) at
the Art Bull gallery in Delhi and the idea of the curatorial venture came as a
response to the horrendous rape and murder of Jyoti Singh on 16th
December 2012. Hailed as Nirbhaya, Singh was put through nerve wrecking cruelty
by four men in a moving bus and after much uproar and protest raised by the
public she was sent to Singapore for treatment where she succumbed to her
injuries.
(Attractor and Sensor/Censor by Megha Joshi)
‘Nirbhaya’ had consolidated the middleclass angst, anger and
protest. The incident also established beyond doubt that India still lived in
middle ages with its chauvinistic attitude towards women in the society. I was the
first one to respond to the incident through an exhibition and the abbreviation,
R.A.P.E was a stand in for ‘Rare Acts of Political Engagement’. Megha was one
of the participating artists and the work that she presented was titled ‘Object.’
A pair of prosthetic areolas pasted on a pair of rubber bulbs of the blow hones
used in the motor vehicles, was erected on a pedestal using plated iron rods.
The work gave an initial shock to the viewers and someone who couldn’t resist
the itch to squeeze it did it and then it was history. Everyone rushed to blow
it and the gallery space reverberated with the honking. Megha achieved not only
what she wanted as the audience response but also a fair amount of fame for the
coming days Delhi could see this work featured in almost all the newspapers and
television channels. Megha Joshi happened on that day and it was in April 2013.
(Red Drawing Series by Megha Joshi)
Since then there has been no looking back for Megha. Hailing
from a socialist family Megha has rebellion in her blood and the flamboyance in
her personality somehow hides her communist leanings and socialist upbringing.
As I mentioned elsewhere, Megha is unapologetic in her works and life. Most of
the ‘feminist’ artists in India refuse to qualify themselves as ‘feminists’
because of the bad associations that the conventional society in India has been
successful in attaching to the word. Megha comes out in a different color; she
is often vocal about her feminism and never hides behind the word feminine. The
same verve is seen in the choice of her themes and materials. Whenever Megha
has a disturbing childhood memory to recollect and say it aloud in public, she
does it with force and pathos; and she is never ashamed of shedding tears in
public. The cathartic act of recounting and retelling personal tragedies
absorbed as a part of historical understanding (therefore not necessarily
personal in the strictest sense) is something makes Megha different from the
lot of her contemporaries for many have the tendency to hoodwink the substantiating
etymologies of their ‘works’ in artificial sophistication.
(Works by Megha Joshi)
Areola or the simulated appearance of it through various
mediums is one the major modes of artistic expression that Megha has chosen to
explore in her works. There is a series of areola works made of paper pulp in
which a simple and upfront representation of it at once focuses and displaces
the discourse to and away from the body part that is characterized by an areola
in a female body, in other words, a breast. Megha does not attach any
sentimental connection to breasts and the mammalian divinity attached to it.
Rather Megha looks at them as a pair of abused, misrepresented and
misinterpreted human/female organs from which natural functionality is eliminated
by the cultural associations of eroticism. Hence, in her works areolas appear
as stark representations as if they have gained their own personality and are
liable to be portrayed as beings, or as broken ‘subjects’ perhaps due to
violation or a deteriorating interface that discards all concepts of beauty,
comfort and pleasure. Megha makes one of the biggest subversions of the areola
by bringing them on the butt cheeks of a classical Venus like torso, in a
quirky displacement of erotic zone. This work is titled ‘Torso QED’. Mutilated
by history, the torso of an ideal female nude has lost the subjectivity and has
become a mere torso for male appreciation and Megha’s intervention makes that
torso lose its historical ‘objectivity’ of appreciation and gain the status of
an erotic object.
(Wounds by Megha Joshi)
The displacement of a human organ should generate revulsion
and embarrassment in the normal circumstances; or else it should create a sense
of bizarre. That’s what happened when the westerners saw the representations of
the Indian gods and goddesses in sculpture for the first time. But in the case
of a female body, the displacement of an organ however does not make it bizarre
but accentuates the male gaze to derive more perverted pleasure. And it is in
the eyes of the (male) onlooker that perversion lies, says the artist by creating
a series of photographs titled ‘Sensor/Censor’. In this series, Megha sticks
the prosthetic areolas on various parts of her body that are generally seen as ‘decent’
upon public exposure. The presence of the areola turns these ‘dignified’ body
portions suddenly into erotic zones. This magic of the society and also the
framing of her body with a clear intention to catch the male gaze and its
perversions add to the simplicity as well as the enigmatic nature of the work.
(Site Specific Installations by Megha Joshi)
Other major mediums that Megha has explored extensively are
wicks, incense sticks, clothes and blinds. ‘Red Drawing’ is a series in which
Megha skillfully uses red colored wicks that are used along with the drawings
of a female torso, a surrogate self-representation in a way, exposing the
simulated eroticized body parts in an attempt to demystify the female body and
its physical effluences. Without exposing the body, Megha keeps her body on a table
of pictorial format for virtually dissecting it in order to understand
clinically about the corporeality that does not often ooze the juices of
erotica, instead produces tears, sweat, pee and menstrual blood. The incense
sticks have a direct connotation regarding the subjection of women within the domestic
sphere strictly bound by religious dictums. They are used for expressing female
genitalia, physical and mental wounds inflicted by such boundaries. Also red
kumkum and hair, the symbols that visibilize the married status of a woman and
the atrocities that she has to face by becoming a pawn in the family feuds,
become Megha’s artistic mediums. Using the blinds made out of incense sticks
and similar materials, she brings out the hanging torsos of women, an entity
caught in the liminal spaces of existence; neither outside nor inside but in
between the threshold, in a precarious hanging.
(Latest Drawings by Megha Joshi)
Megha has also ventured into ceramics, bronze sculptures and
installations in public spaces. Irrespective of the mediums and spaces
available for displaying her works, Megha explores the existence of the females
within an apparently liberal but horribly restrictive society. There is no
self-righteousness attitude in her works nor does one see a sloganeering
feminism in her visual expressions. She positions herself as a witness and a
medium. She works through memories and moments that could have the capacity to
generate histories. The latest series of drawings, which she calls ‘unresolved’
both in terms of working and positioning catches her precarious existence
within the home itself where the relationships between herself, her husband,
children, pet, books, furniture, fridge, gas stove, vegetables, water in the
pipe and so on are brought into focus. She identifies the brittle nature of
relationships, the temporality of churning emotions, practicalities involved in
wading through the cascading ordinariness, negotiating the emotional landscapes
made askew by the intensifying tragedies around and so on and the present
series of drawings comes to us an effort to see them in humanistic ways rather
than something colored by ideologies. Still there is an effort to denude
herself and incarnate as a lonely goddess within a familial pantheon.
-JohnyML
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