Living in Extraordinary Times
An online exhibition featuring five women artists, curated by Arshiya Mansoor Lokhandwala and supported by MASH India, looks critically at our uncertain futures.
“…The state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule…” When the German philosopher Walter Benjamin observed this, it was way back in the 1940s in his book, On the Concept of History, a critical analysis of fascism and the tradition of the oppressed. This observation is, unfortunately, still relevant today in 2020.
The world, in the throes of post-pandemic COVID 19 mayhem is ‘anything but ordinary’ with an impending ‘state of emergency’ hanging over it like a sword. It is this altered state of being that Living the New Normal: In These Extraordinary Times, an online exhibition curated by Arshiya Mansoor Lokhandwala and supported by MASH India.
It presents a set of contemplations that responds critically, though not directly, to this phenomenon through mixed media works of five women artists: Anita Dube, Mithu Sen, Prajakta Potnis, Pushpamala N, and Shilpa Gupta. The work of these artists alludes to the ‘extraordinary but incongruous moment’ that we are experiencing, highlighted through their various bodies of existing work.
“The world as we know it changed forever after December 31st, 2019, when a state of emergency, an uncertain future, a pandemic has gripped the world and driven it into states of being anxious, disoriented and overwhelmed,” reflects Lokhandwala’s curatorial note.
Senior contemporary artist Anita Dube’s, Via Negativa, (2000-2007), recognizes this idea of the ‘future’ through the materially and its philosophically provocative first traces of a photographic print on the negative. It is that intermediary, luminal ground through which every analog photograph must pass- ‘like a rite of passage.’ The image of an eye travels through the white void inside the open mouth; then through the carnal grip of hunger that bites into it; and finally, via this negative terrain, emerges as the luminous moon inside the mouth. In the photographic negative, the black of the pupil appears reversed as white.
Dube shares that such chance elements are, “…the djinns that release fantastic suggestions and stories…” One such story is while Lord Krishna narrating the Gita to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, he sensed Arjuna’s doubt. At that point, he opened his mouth and the whole cosmos (Brahman) was visible inside, putting to rest that idea of uncertainty, for the bearer of that cosmic power was fighting by his side.
Contrast this with works by a younger artist like Prajakta Potnis whose photographic works addresses this idea of ‘uncertainty’ at a Berlin art residency. The dwindling contents of her refrigerator threw up the kitchen debate ‘subterfuge anecdote’ “When the world was in ‘positive danger’ of nuclear annihilation and related anxiety,” shares Potnis. It was not like the veil or cloud is totally off, but from within the confines of a home or better still a kitchen — a site of domestic intensity, washing, grinding, cleaning — the conflict-ridden world holds up its perils, viewable from a homely window. One may be left to wonder; what is left to degenerate and what we hold dear, and freeze within?
Multimedia and performance artist Mithu Sen has been on a personalized visual journey of ‘public’ spaces that have been speaking unlikely poetry to her. It is through a series titled Unsocial Media where a collection of imagery of the deglamorized everydayness of objects, scratch drawings, and photographs that Sen explores the possibilities of halting imagery that scorches into one’s protected ideas of ‘perfection’ and ‘beauty’. Whether it is the cracks in white walls that meet with her scratch drawings, the shadowy phantoms of fans, lights and switchboards or the severed visage of an old display mannequin with a broken teacup, the objects hold unlikely conversations with each other, and the final emotions are of being deeply ‘unsettled’. “These signs that I present are out of frame, out of sense to battle and enrich the digital matrix and tap into a greater shared subconscious,” writes Sen.
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This approach of the everyday finds another contrast with the high drama and narrative of the Phantom Lady or Kismet, (1996-98), the sculptor-turned-performance artist, Pushpamala N’s first “photo-romance” work. The original work comprised 25 black-and-white prints, shot in the film noir style. The thriller starred Pushpamala as not only the Phantom Lady but also her doppelganger, the lost twin sister The Vamp, alongside interesting cameos by artist Atul Dodiya and the curator Lokhandwala!
In the sequel, Return of the Phantom Lady (Sinful City) (2012), she uncovers the suburban world of Navi Mumbai while rescuing an orphaned schoolgirl and evoking all the rich baroque of movie halls, the peeling interiors of dingy offices and slums, with the acid tones of cheap crime thriller covers.
Finally, we may contemplate Half Sky images evoked by Shilpa Gupta, which raises interesting questions about war and the idea of territory; in this context, it is at the Bangladesh–India border. A text behind the imagery reveals, ‘I tried very hard to cut the sky in half. One for my lover and one for me. But the sky kept moving and clouds from his territory came into mine…” In this work Gupta proposes a world where lines get blurred and occupied territories get merged by a soldier writing poetry in the trenches of the ongoing battle.
Check out the exhibition live, Tuesday, May 5 till July 5 Live on www.mashindia.com
Text By Georgina Maddox
Image Courtesy: Anita Dube, Mithu Sen, Prajakta Potnis, Pushpamala N, and Shilpa Gupta
Find out more about the Artists and Gallery:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
http://naturemorte.com/artists/anitadube/
https://naturemorte.com/artists/mithusen/
