Lavanya Mani’s sustained refusal to prioritize the human figure anchors her current ongoing exhibition at Gallery Chemould, Mumbai. Instructively entitled Signs taken for Wonders [1], the show is marked by a critique of narratives that regard some species as more powerful and important than others, and calls for a flattening of ecological hierarchies. The title also has other ideological resonances: as Mani assembles diverse natural elements and living beings on her cloth canvas, she initiates an interaction between the regime of wonder, surprise and fantasy, and the realm of the grounded, real and present.
Baroda-based Mani is known for her investment in the Kalamkari technique [2], which is marked by the use of natural dyes and cotton textiles. Her engagement with the technique underlines the questions of sustainability which are integral to the imagining of a world that rejects human hierarchy. But a short video which demonstrates the sedimentation process of Indigo dyes hints at a deeper connection between Mani’s chosen medium, and her message. As components of the dyes swirl and settle, they appear to configure new worlds within their small containers, mimicking the gradual geological processes that shape the earth. Mani also summons the evocative potential of mirrorwork and applique, which serve to augment the layeredness that anchors the works’ conceptual imagination.
Since the works are unified by their preoccupation with environmental fragility, it is hardly surprising that the exhibition essay quotes ecofeminist Donna Haraway. While the note mentions Haraway’s conceptualisation of the earth as a force that is simultaneously capable of construction and devastation, Mani’s work itself can be seen as a deeply meditative illustration of Haraway’s conceptualisation of the Chthulucene.
Imagined as a counter to the Anthropocene, the Chthulucene has been characterised as a time-space marked by the realisation that “commitment and collaborative work and play” between all forms of terrains is the singular course of action that can open up possibilities for a flourishing earth (Haraway, 2015). Mani’s work depicts a range of real and fantastical species- from spores to vertebrates- inhabiting a darkly vibrant world, closely mirroring Haraway’s assertion that humans do not act alone. On the contrary, it is “assemblages of organic species and of abiotic actors” that “make history, the evolutionary kind and the other kinds too” (Haraway, 2015).
Several of Mani’s paintings- such as Spore Trail and Improbable Planet- arrange these assemblages of actors around a dramatic central event that resemble an explosion. These pieces, very obviously, evoke the familiar relationship between the destructive and creative energies of an explosion, and the opening up of a new world. But they also appear to subvert the deeply-entrenched attachment between such eruptions, and violence.
The works make a political statement about diversity also through the inspirations that have catalysed them: Mani draws on Persian Sufi literature, German myths and legends, Mughal miniatures, and the natural sciences. In a formal nod to the religious resonances in the work, four of the works are triptychs. The paintings thus succeed in creating a world that resonates with several disparate cultural and geographical ecosystems.
Since they are marked by heterogeneity, Mani’s paintings have been compared to pre-modern cabinets of curiosity- a connection that is underlined by the use of the triptych, which bears physical resemblance to an open cabinet. This anachronism serves to highlight the temporal fluidity of Mani’s work: her paintings are emblematic of a moment of reckoning that is nostalgically past, alarmingly current, and anxiously anticipated.
The exhibition is on at Gallery Chemould until April 30, 2019
Endnotes:
[1] Literary scholar Franco Moretti’s book Signs taken for Wonders unpacks the sense of wonder associated with canonical literary texts to explore the relations between high and mass culture. Signs taken for Wonders is also the title of Homi K. Bhabha’s landmark 1985 essay, which examines the mechanisms through which a sense of wonder around “the English book” sustained the cultural and political hegemony of colonial rulers.
[2] Kalamkari, which literally means “craftsmanship with a pen”, is a technique of patterning textiles with natural dyes. Practised primarily in the south-Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, it is characterised by a time-consuming and intricate process which involves hand or block printing of cotton or silk fabric with the use of a bamboo or date-palm pen.
References:
[1] Haraway, Donna (2015):Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin, Environmental Humanities, 6, pp. 159-165
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Home is where memory lives
Sumakshi Singh explores the role of memory as arbitrator and intermediary between the material and the imagined in 33 Link Road, a show of her new work at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai. As she embroiders white thread to craft fragile, airy and intricate reconstructions of the homes in which she has lived, including her ancestral home in New Delhi, Singh underlines the frangibility of memories, especially those which appear to be safely emplaced in the physical space of the domestic.
Singh has previously used embroidery to demonstrate intransitivity, fragility and impermanence. In a previous show entitled In The Garden, for instance, she explored the resonance between threadwork and the preservation of memories (Vijayan, 2016). 33 Link Road extends her preoccupations with the visual parallels between thread and memory by complicating the association: memories might be fragile, but they are anchored in spaces of nostalgia, and entangled in discourses of history. However, by reimagining windows, brick walls, gates and staircases as transparent, intricately woven and ephemeral facades, she also complicates the assumptions of the durable materiality associated with architectural forms.
Some embroidered pieces are arranged as panels that appear as if suspended in air, while others are fused with albaca or cotton rag paper. The display points to the contradiction inherent in the location of memories - demonstrating their buoyancy and impermanence even as it emphasises the determined manner in which they embed themselves within physical artefacts.
Several of the panels are arranged as interweaving grids. The labyrinthine placement of the works allows new patterns to emerge as the viewer walks past and around the display: panels transform into a unicoloured kaleidoscope, whose attraction rests not in mutating colours, but in changing shapes and shifting patterns. These kaleidoscope mutations hint at the many ways in which the politics and meaning of a space shift with differentvantage points.
The thread reincarnations of gates, walls and windows are also arranged one behind the other, with each surface revealing the layer behind it. Thus, work succeeds in materialising a visual pun, inviting gazes that “look past the surface” of both, memory and matter. The arrangement is also a physical manifestation of the conceptualisation of memory as a palimpsest; as spaces and textures overlap, meanings get reconfigured and memories are remade.
The exhibition note compares the embroidered, life-sized panels to leaves that are compressed in a book. The skeletal structures are thus imagined as remnants of a nostalgic and careful hoarding of artefacts that have special emotional recall. But the wispy, intricate threadwork is also reminiscent of a spiderweb, an organic object that is emblematic of long-term neglect and disuse. Together, these metaphors accurately summarise the emotions associated with the past. This conflict is emphasised by the political context of the home, since Singh’s grandparents moved into 33 Link Road when they arrived in India after Partition.
Memories have often been imagined as valuable archival repositories that map rich metahistories. As Singh pulls the domestic realm into the space of memory, she invites audiences to imagine their ancestral homes as archives of a grand historical narrative, as well as a specific personal past.
The exhibition was on at Sakshi Gallery until April 13, 2019
References:
Vijayan, Naveena (2016): Mapping Memories, The Hindu, June 27,