• 
• 
• 
• 

Fibroids of the Urban Wombs

Prajakta Potnis’ latest solo at the Guild Gallery, Mumbai has generated a deeper interest amongst the art critics in relating her works with the urban desires and diseases. Shubhalakshmi Shukla has her observations on these works

Observations:
One way to observe Prajakta’s ongoing show is to understand the order of displayed works. The initial most space is an interior wherein the walls are covered with the images of a pimpled skin (suggestive of a wall paper!). In the lower most corner of the room, the two electric switches are plugged in with the braided hair that spread out open and lie down loose on the ground.

The above image of the interior could have been easily interpreted as a self-motivated uncanny design of a disrupted kind of omnipresent feminine principle, of mythical nature. However, its significance communicates a more complex meaning than merely this bizarre experience, suggesting knowledge about the beauty that could be skin deep or even surreal in fast changing urban situations.                 .    

One might have preferred to choose a clichéd beginning of placing ‘No Entry’ painted by her as the first exhibit in this order. In this painting the entrance door appears like an opaque surface or an enclosed box. It appears to be a three- dimensional enclosed structure with hair like textural strands, or darkened capillaries and some unreadable graffities with a locked iron latch. The structure seems to be placed against the background of a commonly seen surface of checkered cloth which is the most acceptable print for the middle class-wear in Indian town ships. This cloth used for making men’s shirts occurs as a texture in her other paintings too, where she uses the cut out pieces of cloth on the building facades.

These entrances, for one, may seem to become a surrogate for the pathway for the exhibits which speak about the city’s environment, explicitly marking the newly erected built structures. The order of these buildings in the show is deliberately kept in silent sequence in a such a way that there may be a possibility of the dialogue between the exhibits.  The facades of the built structures which are mainly residential complexes get organized in connection to their central axis, which may be a deliberately chosen to be with an obscured sense of centre of gravity. She also attempts to unravel the ‘manual’ aspect of these newly constructed sites by intentionally placing internal visceral forms as fused with, at times with the bitten up edges. This appears to be a new approach to deny the skin-deep presence of these built structures as representing a ‘middle-class desire’. The silence of this absurd fusion of internal choices with the external built facades takes a voice at a point when one observes that the built structures are monumental and at the same time a ‘model’ within an enclosed space. The scale of these structures alters within the painted-frame on the basis of these alternating experiences (of dream and reality).

The built structures therefore appear to dwindle between an experience of claustrophobic and an agoraphobic experience at the same time building up a schizophrenic reality about these sites.

On the other hand the building surfaces appear to be already in a programmatic kind of erosion, suggesting the fragility of the materials used for constructing the dream-models for housing. They come across as masticated surfaces from certain angles along with the centralized internal organs as units that may create a new order of the façade. However, the presence of these reclining as well as erected built structures happen to suggest a dramatically segregated social structure/s within the so called democratic living conditions within India. While there are social-divisions, for instance on the basis of a Jain Residential Complex, or a Muslim Residential Complex, yet Prajakta has been able to cultivate a determined knowledge about the truth behind the urban struggle for a middle class-desire to own a space.

Details:

Prajakta’s noticeable simile created around the growth pattern of a fibroid with that of the urban sprawls creates an interesting dimension to the show. It allows the onlooker to be a part and parcel as well as question the ‘planned’ and the rational equation that the urban planning could no more involve in spite of the highest levels consciousness. 

She interestingly details upon the fibroid granules may be inside of a mouth or gluttonous with the smoky patches creating an intermingling of the claustrophobic along with the agoraphobic spaces once again.

A continuation of her engagement with the ‘tongue’ series takes a more complex composition that stretches out like a surface of the ground. She brings forth an imagination of the ground that could have embossed undulating surfaces like of women’s chest.

It is interesting to observe that due to subtlety of colors in these compositions, it may not really appear to be like a psychedelic’s approach within the mind but those that exist factually in physical space.