THE SHIFTING LINES OF INTERSECTIONAL IDENTITIES
The idea of home is transient and yet permanent, it is both memory and reality, and more importantly it is so many things in-between these opposing states, that one often falls short to describe this very personal feeling of what is constituted as ‘home’. ‘Of Liminal Beings and Other Spaces’, is an exhibition, curated by Ushmita Sahu the Director and Head Curator of Emami Art in Kolkata, that attempts to address this state of transition. On till August 28, 2021 at Emami Art.
The exhibition brings together five artistic practices that explore the idea of the space in-between our binary existence of home and the outside. Spaces that are intangible and interstitial, which allude to but also elude normative dualistic norms. “The idea of ‘liminality, and an in-between space’ came up a lot when thinking about ‘home’ during the Pandemic. The exhibition was born out of the opposing states of lockdown against the frantic re-location of the immigrant workers to their homes,” says Sahu, over a crackling phone line to Kolkata.
The exhibition features a group of young artists some of whom Sahu has been mentoring for the last few years. They are Arpita Akhanda, Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai, Debashish Paul, Maksud Ali Mondal and Prasanta Ghosh. Each artist works with different mediums, from installation to performance, from video art to temporal ‘biotopes.’ “By juxtaposing these distinct practices, the exhibition hopes to create a reflexive re-framing of cognitive and experiential identities, that initiate new possibilities of encounters and provide alternative frameworks for thinking, consequently becoming a locus for transitions,” writes Sahu. The coming together of these five artists was a very organic process for Sahu given that she was aware of their practices and how they all have their own connections with the idea of home and the self.
Arpita Akhanda quests for identity in past/present, colonised/coloniser dualisms, while Arshi Ahmadzai focuses on women’s private vs public chronicles via a language that negotiates text and image. Debashish Paul, who identifies as non-binary, grapples with the dominant male/female-gendered readings. Finally, Maksud Mondal creates nature-identical environments that foreground the cycle of life and death, while Prasanta Ghosh‘s fictional/factual narratives fluidly move between truth and non-truths.
“While Arpita was growing up, her grandfather and grandmother would tell her stories of partition, instead of bedtime fairy tales. Her grandfather himself was an artist who experienced partition and was deeply moved by it. In many ways this forms the core of Arpita’s practice. She sees herself as a memory collector,” says Sahu. The artist is known to work with ‘paper weaving’ inspired by her past and her present. Her work Ak Chala speaks of her family settling in Odisha. The backlit digital prints capture the performance of her creating an iron armature as a recreation of memory, border and land. In another performance, The Last Leap, she crosses over from one ‘territory’ to another, where her dress gets torn and tattered by the barbed wire surrounding her. She addresses ‘101 ways’, in which one can cross the border.
Debashish Paul came on board when he responded to an ‘Open Call’ by Emami Art for artists last year during the pandemic. His work speaks of his own process of self-acceptance, to gain comfort in his own skin and to speak about his gender binary identity, despite the fetters of a conservative society. “The intention is to break free of the constraints of his rural background, which can be quite restrictive. This despite the fact that gender in the Asian context has always been fluid. One often sees it as an imposed post-Colonial restraint on a gender- inclusive society,” says Sahu.
To express his gender fluidity, Paul created a dress made of shells. The making of the dress was created over a long durational performance that involved walking to the site, collecting the shells and walking back (done during March-April 2021). Finally, the artist walked over 14 kms carrying the heavy shell 25 kg dress on his head and then he wore it at the site after performing a ritual-like shamanistic dance. This was recorded as a video and now both performance & dress are displayed in the gallery.
Maksud Ali Mondal’s work speaks of the intertwining of life and death, processes that are conjoined and yet separate. He works with biological and feral life in the current environment by observing organisms growing and transforming over time, interacting with found objects and everyday materials in his work. His ‘Biotopes’ speak of art as an experience rather than a ‘product’ he invites the audience to ‘watch’ as vegetal organisms grow in real time and through imagery. It is seen through a philosophical lens which is a part of the process of life and death.
Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai practice has focused on the role of women, particularly those that are bound within religious orthodoxies. Inspired by the texts of various poets and philosophers, Ahmadzai’s artworks juxtapose images and text to comment on women and their roles.
“I had been following her work. I was particularly struck by her conversation on the writing of letters with her mother since it highlighted the feminine voice that encapsulates the personal and the political, private and the public. Her large scroll is a recreation of an imagined philosophical conversation,” says Sahu. The imagined conversation is between the Sufi Saint Al Khansa and the Kashmiri Saivite poetess Lal Ded about interconnectedness between everything in the universe.
Prashanta Ghosh’s work examines the role of an interviewer, and the interviewee, the textual and the political and he looks at the condition of the unwell at actual hospitals in his new work. His practice integrates self-developed docu-fiction, isolated text, and discourse of sound, video and visuals entwined with each other. While his works take an Investigative approach, it is difficult to separate fact from fiction. “He taps into the political unrest of the time in different ways, like an activist and a poet,” adds Sahu.
“They’re all within the threshold space of the intersectional. We have to look beyond the normative, we have to question our own sanity, and we may look at the light falling through the cracks. One hopes to amplify the voices of the artists,” says Sahu about presenting these five distinct practices and experiential identities.
Text by Georgina Maddox
Images courtesy: Emami Art
Find more about Gallery, Artists and artworks:
https://indiaartfair.in/programme/of-liminal-beings-and-other-spaces
https://www.arpitaakhanda.com/
https://www.goethe.de/ins/in/en/m/culture/kuenste/fmi/mam.html
