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Bold Statements in Soft Voice
Amrita Gupta Singh has got nothing but bouquets for the curator Bose Krishnamachari who presented ‘Soft Spoken’, a group show of six women artists. However, she is skeptical about the title being chauvinistic. In this insightful review the author critically contextualizes the bold statements from the soft spoken.
Soft-Spoken, the term itself conjures up images of genteelness, of being demure; what could this term be interpreted in context of artworks, especially of contemporary women artists? Was’nt the title chauvinistic in many ways, it had the possibility of sparking off a heated feminist debate! Curated by the provocative artist-curator, Bose Krishnamachari, the invitation of this exhibition also did not provide any clues; it had the image of an urban woman, with her back turned to the viewer, looking at sculptures against a monumental architectural façade. Over the years, Bose Krishnamachari has always negated constructed hierarchies in his art practice and works simultaneously with realism, abstraction, sculptural objects, installations and has curated numerous exhibitions, traversing the barricades of theory and practice.
What was Bose, who always has had an assortment of surprises for the art world, up to with Soft-Spoken? This was a show of six contemporary women artists, but both the visual inscrutability of the invitation card and the title of the show made me wonder what the actual works would actually be like? I was not disillusioned, the curation was crisp and exceptional, each work demanding the precise attention of the viewer; the exhibition comprised of paintings that weaved in figurative and abstract art languages, the connecting tenor being the visual delicacy, of soft hues and internal, private statements. Yet the statements, non-confrontational and small-scale as they were, spoke of individualistic feminine sensibilities, exploring the realms of the Self via multiple trajectories. It is in this interplay of ambiguities that this exhibition becomes operative. One could label this show to be cutting –edge, presenting a diversity of visual languages that fall squarely within the dynamics of the contemporary and the parameters of the post-modern.
The artists included Minal Damani, Sheetal Gattani, Prabhavathi Meppayil, Parvathi Nayar, Prajakta Potnis, and Varunika Saraf. The known names apart, Bose introduced two artists who hail from Kerala, Parvathi Nayar and Parabhavati Meppayil. While Nayar is based in Singapore, Meppayil lives and works in Bangalore. Explorative and experimental in material and medium, the works map the aesthetics of the female experience, the circumstantial identity of the female body and the validation of 'non-high' art forms such as craft, re-visioning miniature traditions, the trajectories of memory and the artistic process, surreal imagery, the formlessness of form, expressing formal and conceptual concerns that act as “auto-conversations…that weave into the urban fabric”; As Bose says, “Their art is their process that finds commonalities in expression. The visual softness of their medium spins narratives of brilliantly purified ideas that strengthen both the core and the periphery. These artists speak the language of soft-spoken paintings. Their works brim with a strange simplicity, are poetic and have a cortege of consciousness”.
Damani’s work are like scribbles, repeated mark-making that covers the entire surface of the paper/space, almost obsessive in nature, working across two levels – the micro and the macro, the intimate crossed thighs of a woman become undulating hills, the body representing the larger landscape, the private becoming the universal; “It is like the self fused with the self or something like personal grafted in to personal”. She weaves, crafts, and fabricates forms on empty rooms, floors, hands, mouths, referencing to the Self/Body vis-à-vis its relation to empty space, working in the in-betweens of abstraction and narration. There is a certain order in Damani’s mark-making, like the order of cells within the body, and the order that penetrates the entirety of the universe; in the extremities of intricate detail and space, Damani’s works pulsate, revealing a sophisticated aesthetic intellection, a personalized language that refuses to be categorized.
Gattani’s reductive abstractions are evocations of tranquility; working within the explosive visual culture in Bombay, it is remarkable that she builds a language that filters out all extraneous sights and sounds, the surface built up with layers of water colours, reminding one of peeling damp walls, the skin/body of paper maintains secrets that wait to unfold; an expansive light emanates from these paintings, forms and structures merging and emerging from the unknown, evolving from “natural forces” as it were.
Prabhavathi Meppayil’s intimate paintings are meditative, drawing the viewer to white lime gesso panels where linear forms emerge and evaporate at the same time; delicately painted in gold and pearl lines, allude to body hair; the reticent female figure, just in pale pink outlines
is miniaturesque in form. Meppayil approaches the surface like a wall painting, she has worked with traditional mural painters, and explores natural materials. Material and surface is very important to her work and also the ambiguity of surface and form, she tenderly narrates her stories, the jewel-like surface and inherent lyricism seducing the viewer to discover the mysteries that her paintings hold within themselves.
At first glance, Parvathi Nayar’s paintings seem abstract, but when one looks closely, the shapes are too definitive to be abstract. Taking microscopic and magnified views of objects, like skin or muscles, Nayar’s work is both intimate and epic; moon craters, body cells, the human eye, city lights, all objects are seen from the lens of a microscope, but allude to the larger cosmic macrocosm as well. Done in pencil against wood, the blacks/whites underscore the austere minimalism that she employs to evoke the notion of “how the entire universe is within the body…from the subatomic to the terrestrial”.
The half- constructed house mocks our middle-class aspirations of security, while the bouquet with flowers that take on ejaculatory phallic shapes or salivating tongues point out to the consumerism that urban dwellers constantly indulge in, given the explosive capitalistic pressures of our times. Prajakta Potnis, via a surreal language and seductive soft hues, deals with the “anxiety for appreciation and acceptance in normal city life”. In an ambiguous in-between space of subjectivity and objectivity, Potnis carves out statements that are critical of the psychological dilemmas, the shifts and slips, and the social definitions in contemporary society that revolve around consumption and its patterns and effects.
Varunika Saraf’s figurative works, framed in jewel-like second-hand Benarasi sari borders or covered with silver cobwebs, and done in watercolours evokes the miniature traditions of Mughal and Kangra courts, and her training in Wasli painting. Graduating recently from art school, Saraf’s real challenge was when she started dealing with eastern traditions, and this young artist has been conscious in this choice. Delicately patterned in floral motifs, the protagonist, deals with her dreams, aspirations and private demons in isolation, conversations with the Self that sometimes provides solutions, and sometimes not.
Soft- spoken is one of the rare exhibitions in recent times that one would like to visit each day; one can only congratulate Bose Krishnamachari for presenting to us such a precise curated event.
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