“When you come, remind me to give you a copy of the book,” Kanchan Chander said while chatting on WhatsApp. She was inviting me to her solo exhibition, The Grammar of the Self, presented by Gallery Ragini and curated by Kishore Singh at the LTC Gallery, Bikaner House, New Delhi. As usual, the devil in me typed the answer: “When you see me in the gallery, please remember that you are supposed to give me a copy of your book.”
A pause. Then came the answer: “I am seventy. Sometimes I forget. I want you to have the book.”
Kanchan Chander, seventy years old—my God, I thought. I have seen artists whom I met in their prime turn grey, then white and fragile. Then I realise that I, too, am growing older. I couldn’t believe that she had turned seventy, or was about to, because when I met her for the first time, thirty-one years ago, she already had grey hair and a mature way of conducting herself in the art scene.
Kanchan has been around in the art scene for nearly half a century, it seems. She entered the art world from East Germany, where her diplomat father was posted. During the Emergency in 1975, as a young girl, she joined the Delhi College of Art. Soon after, her father was posted to Chile, which took her to Santiago University, where she pursued art studies for three years before returning to Delhi and graduating. A scholarship took her to Paris, where, at the École des Beaux-Arts, Kanchan studied printmaking and got married. The marriage did not last. She brought up her son, Palav Chander, himself an artist of some repute in the art scene.
Nobody leaves the gallery without asking, “Where were these works, Kanchan?” And she has a stock answer for all: “In the drawers, safely stashed away, only to be found now.”
For many, like me, Kanchan is an artist who makes “torsos” in various forms, formats and mediums. It has exasperated many, and when she switched to the sequined immortals, such as Madhubala and Marilyn Monroe, art lovers felt good. I think the reason was that nobody knew the trajectory of her artistic development. Many thought that she drew those torsos because she did not know how to draw.
Anyone who speaks conceptually, especially after the success of the Raqs Media Collective, is often met with the assumption that “yeh banda ko drawing nahi aata” (“This guy does not know how to draw”). When Kanchan explained her torsos with some inclination towards feminist theories, as she was keeping company with some firebrands in the genre, we all thought perhaps theories would help her eventually, the way Nalini Malani or Zarina Hashmi were “saved”, despite our lack of visual information regarding their formative years and exhaustive drawing experiences.
With The Grammar of the Self, we encounter a different Kanchan, whose open-ended torsos now fall into place as we see the archival material drawn from her stock of early drawings, prints, paintings and printmaking matrices. All of this is exhibited in one “look back in fondness” exhibition, given an appropriate curatorial shape by Kishore Singh.
Perhaps the exhibition should be called The Autobiography of the Self, but then anything said about the self is autobiography. So the alteration does not stand, but the meaning of the intent does. The show as a whole provides the topographies of aesthetics and craft that the artist has travelled through over the last fifty years.
From the earliest drawings of family members to the self-portraits of sudden self-awareness, one could understand how the young artist knew she was worthy of her chosen vocation. The more she drew, the more she archived. Tragedies, personal and familial, altered her images but never her focus. She found a special camaraderie with her mother, which she expressed through drawings and etchings. After her brother’s accidental death, her father became a loner, and she witnessed his weariness and pain through her works. She held on to these works for a long time for us to see, and they are now part of the exhibition.
Chance encounters with Bhuta Aradhana of the tribals at an exhibition held at the Delhi Crafts Museum brought a different thrust to her work, as she began experimenting with raw divinities in their frontal forms. Before that, her Parisian experiences had turned her into a caricaturist of sorts, transforming faces into noses growing out of faces and frames, giving them a comic, phallic presence. For her, these were symbols of nosey people and also of those who keep their noses up in the air to show their superiority. But autobiographically, it was also a take on the nose of her own spouse.
Kanchan painted and printed loneliness in the way Käthe Kollwitz had done. Her ideal in the beginning was Henry Moore, whose voluptuous sculptures found resonances in the bodies familiar to her. The motherliness of a round body and the genetic transference of the same to her may also have indirectly led her to portray her protagonists as well-endowed women, but drowned in sorrow and loneliness.
That does not mean that Kanchan has portrayed only sad women and men. After a certain stage, she moved from the representational aspects to the techniques of representation in various graphic mediums, which she has perfected, as the works in the exhibition demonstrate.
There is a conscious avoidance of the torso series, though an experimental row of works is presented, in which the female body turns into a horse-like torso, with suggestions of a spine—something that reminds one of the works of Atul Dodiya.
The exhibition is accompanied by a book, mentioned at the outset, which includes an interview with Kanchan by the curator himself, apart from his introductory curatorial essay, recognisably carved out of the interview. Senior artist Waswo has written about the lonely female figures, while Lina Vincent has detailed the techniques Kanchan has used in her works. There is also an article titled “Body as Archive” by Anita Jung.
The show closes on 18 September.
JohnyML
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